What Is Inbound Marketing and Why It Is Important for Your Business Success
Over the years, marketing tactics have changed. For most business owners, terms such as advertising, outbound marketing, and inbound marketing are used interchangeably. However, each of these marketing strategies are useful in their own way with inbound marketing as one of the most upcoming strategies that show the highest conversions.
This article discusses what inbound marketing is and why it is important for your business’ success.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is focused on attracting prospective customers to your business. It also gains your current customers’ attention and keeps them engaged and purchasing. Inbound marketing revolves around the sharing of content.
Three Important Aspects of Inbound Marketing
There is not just one tactic that makes up inbound marketing. There are three important aspects of inbound marketing that includes Search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and business blogging.
- SEO is a method used to help customers find your business fast via online search criteria. This can be done via searching for your product or service via Google, industry review sites, articles, press releases, and more. If you’ve heard of keyword optimization, this is a large part of it. Customers will find you using your keywords.
- Social media is everywhere and even for companies that do not actively engage in social sharing, their customers do it for them. That is why it is crucial to take ownership of your social media presence so you can account for the good and bad about you. Just as with SEO, potential customers can search for information about your business, and it will exist somewhere on the Net.
- Finally, business blogging is an important inbound marketing tool because customers want to find relevant and helpful information. Your blog can be a combination of helpful articles, how-to’s, videos, and infographics.
Outbound Marketing Is Being Tuned Out
One reason that inbound marketing is gaining so much attention now is simply because outbound marketing is being phased out, whether businesses want to recognize this or not. Sure, it’ll never go away completely and still hold relevance, but for some businesses, especially small ones, outbound marketing is being tuned out by consumers.
Leads are no longer generated this way as consumers are ignoring traditional postcard advertising methods, large email blasts, and even trade shows. Television marketing is not as important either as customers can DVR their favorite shows and fast forward right past your commercial.
Consumers Are Actually Searching For You
Consumers know what they want, and thanks to the internet, they know what they need as well. Now it is up to your business to show consumers why your business provides the best product or service they need. Through localized search engine results, they can find you quickly without the need for the Yellow Pages or to flip through newspaper inserts.
It is a Cost-Effective Marketing Strategy
Another reason that inbound marketing is so important to businesses success is because it saves them money on marketing expenses. Inbound marketing is a proven, cost-effective marketing strategy. There is no need to spend your marketing budget on ad space, lead purchases, representatives calling the lists, or even creating any of that content.
Inbound marketing content can be done effectively in-house, or you can hire a freelance professional to assist you with your content. There are also many free systems available for your use to not only help monitor your content, but analyze it and offer suggestions as well. Google Analytics is one such system to use on your website to analyze your inbound efforts.
Amazing Way to Learn Who Your Audience Is
Prior to some of the inbound marketing strategies available today, to discover your target market, there were mounds of data to collect via marketing firms and surveys. However, today you can easily identify your audience via inbound marketing and break down their demographics.
Through the right observations, you can find out what your audience was on your website or social media page searching for, what they actively engaged with, and even what content they disliked. This enables you to provide the content your audience truly wants and can use, guaranteeing to attract other like-minded customers.
As you can see, inbound marketing brings not just website visitors, but the right targeted audience to you. This helps convert those searching for your products and services to loyal customers.
Conclusion
It is proven that inbound marketing is a way for businesses to effectively and organically reach customers in a cost effective manner. Consumers are more educated on methods to research and find information pertaining to their needs, so they are able to find organizations who meet their needs on their own. Your role is to provide them with relevant and engaging content to show them you are the best business for them.