We’re living in an age where millennials resort to looking up on Google or checking Twitter for news feeds and ads instead of relying on the television or newspapers. It’s not the 1800s anymore where people preferred traditional advertising methods.
If you haven’t heard of what inbound marketing is, it’s high time you know of its benefits at least, and learn some ins and outs.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound Marketing for business is a way of drawing your audience into your digital channels in an indirect way. Think of it in this way, it’s like blending in with your crowd and giving them what they want instead of appearing too salesy and intrusive. With the rampant adoption of ad blockers, inbound marketing has become an alternative way of presenting your brand and product organically to your potential customers.
Outbound marketing is ads, TV commercials, flyers, and salesmen making cold calls or direct mails. Inbound is the opposite – you simply put up a website, a social media page, and let your target audience find you. How do they do that? You put up quality content on your services and when they look up similar services online, you show up on their search results.
According to a Hubspot study, 59% of marketers said inbound marketing attracted higher quality leads compared to traditional methods of advertising.
Let’s take a look at the benefits of inbound marketing and what it brings to your business plate.
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1. It Saves You Money
What do you think costs more money? Posting on a website and company blog or running multiple ads on the radio and TV Channels? And the surprising fact is inbound marketing delivers you results, unlike anything it is outbound counterpart achieves.
The stats below speak for themselves. And since it’s cheap, it works fantastic for both small-scale companies and large businesses alike.
2. Your Customers Become Your Friends
Unlike outbound marketing where you send direct mails or resort to cold calling, inbound marketing centres around winning your potential audience’s interest. This means you talk to your customers directly like a friend and not as a person who is trying to push the product onto them. As a result, your customer gets hooked and thus returns for more. Think about what happens when your company Facebook page garners a huge audience through interesting videos and quality content. They don’t just up and leave, they stay. And the best part is that it doesn’t cost you to make new posts either.
3. You Attract Your Target Audience
Inbound marketing makes it easier for you to reach out to your target audience online. You sell to your prospects exactly what they want and this is the key element of success that lies in this strategy of marketing. According to Andrew Davis: Content build relationships. Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenue.”
Customer segmentation is another key advantage. You simply launch a new campaign whenever you want to diversify your offerings, something which you can’t do through traditional advertising. You get to keep your existing product and introduce your new lineup at the same time – it’s win-win.
4. You Build Brand Authority
Since you’re building brand awareness by educating your target audience through quality content that eventually leads to building brand authority. Take Hubspot, for instance – they’re the number one resource on Inbound Content Marketing and became that by sharing quality info online. In a way, when your customers like your brand image, they spread the word and your audience builds up.
5. You Get Access To Analytics
Inbound marketing tools like Google Analytics and the Search Engine console can reveal a lot of data about your leads. You get to know your metrics such as bounce rates, crawl rates, and your click-through conversions. You learn where most of your audience comes from and which posts or products they like. This helps you customize your landing page optimization and sell more effectively. And these insights literally make or break your business. The data speaks for itself when sales align with your marketing tactics.
6. Your Customers Sign up For Your Mailing List
You no longer have to resort to direct mail with inbound marketing. You simply provide a mailing list feature which your prospects can sign up for. And once they’re onboard, they will be informed whenever you launch new campaigns.
7. It’s Less Intrusive too
Since your customers are actively engaged, they’re more than likely to keep an eye on your products. This means you don’t have to reach out to them since they come to you. Also, it’s less intrusive this way.
8. You Define Your Buyer Persona
The biggest advantage of using inbound marketing tools lies in defining buyer personas. Using the demographics, statistics, and metrics you get using Real-time analytics tools and trends, you can define and map out your buyer personas. This helps you make informed and better decisions when it comes to developing and launching new products. Which means you spend less time figuring out since you know what your prospective customers are looking for.
9. You Make Quality Content That Makes An Impact
No more boring ads or TV commercials. You make content that your customers simply love, and this content stays with you for life. Content marketing (which is its subset) gives you much more creative freedom than you think, through outlets like video marketing, PPC campaigns, SEO ads, blog posts, infographics, and much more.
10. You Interact with Your Customers
We’re not kidding. Your brand grows with your customers. You get to personally interact with them and learn about their likes/dislike. By running a few surveys every year, you get personalized feedback and reviews, something which TV ads, flyers, and newspapers will never get you. That’s the power of social media marketing – two-way communication.
The key to building a successful business is to make your customers happy. And since inbound marketing is designed to do just that, what more can we say?
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