Generally, businesses tend to rely on outbound marketing techniques such as advertising, direct mail campaigns, and sales calls to find new customers. Recently though, there’s a new trend emerging over the past few years and it’s called inbound marketing.
What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing makes it easier for customers to find your business via the Internet, as opposed to you trying to find them through traditional marketing and advertising techniques. Your company’s website is central to your inbound marketing strategy as it’s the gateway to your digital presence. Customers can find you via a search engine, one of your social media posts, or a customer review site.
Why inbound marketing?
1. People’s buying patterns have changed
Consumers have become increasingly smarter about tuning out pure marketing messages. People want to remain in control of their buying process and that’s why they’re turning to the Internet more and more.
To stay on top of this trend, you need to offer relevant and high-quality content. As time goes on you’ll be perceived as an expert and trusted advisor in your field, instead of a vendor wanting to sell something.
2. Inbound marketing is cost-effective
It’s been found that businesses that rely on inbound marketing strategies have a lower cost per sales lead than those who use outbound marketing strategies. For example, a blog costs the same whether it attracts 1 000 or 100 000 visitors. Whereas, with outbound techniques such as direct mail, the costs will vary depending on your number of impressions.
On top of that, many of the content publishing tools that you’ll use for your inbound marketing programme are inexpensive.
3. Visitors are more likely to turn into customers
The people who find your business online through inbound marketing are likely to be actively looking for your product or service. These people are known as ‘warm leads’ and are different from the ones you’d find through cold calling or blanket advertising. Follow these steps to reap the benefits of inbound marketing:
Develop a content strategy
Your strategy needs to identify gaps in your content and outline goals for future development whether it be a blog, advice articles, how-to videos, e-books, or other material. You should then come up with a realistic plan and assign responsibilities to employees or freelancers.
You must remember to learn and implement strategies that will optimise your site and content to be found by search engines, which is known as search engine optimisation (SEO).
Engage potential customers
Engaging potential customers is the essence of a social media strategy. A key step is to determine whether your customers are already taking part in social media communities such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
You need to be where your customers are and make sure to constantly interact with them and post links that direct them to content on your site. Think about and test whether they are more responsive to certain content formats than efforts, which will help you to prioritise your efforts.
Focus on converting visitors into customers
Considering the potential high value of inbound leads, it’s not enough to simply offer great content. Once people have found you then you have to think about how to convert them into customers, which means making it easy for them to take the next step.
For example, you could highlight sales offers on your homepage or set up an automatic email confirmation process that includes a sales offer when visitors download a free e-book.
The potential for increasing sales through inbound marketing is promising but it does not mean that you should stop doing outbound marketing altogether. Instead, you need to find a balance between the two.
It will take time before the volume of leads you obtain through inbound marketing counterbalances the volume of leads obtained through traditional techniques. This is exactly why you should start right away!
If your business requires any marketing assistance, visit the Barrk Marketing business page to access their contact and service information.