What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound digital marketing is a marketing method developed in the past two decades since commercial activities exploded on the Internet. This marketing method uses various techniques to attract qualified traffic to your website, enticing those visitors to become leads, and eventually, engaging those leads to become paying customers.
Let’s look at each stage of this process to get a deeper understanding of how each one works in inbound marketing:
- Attract Qualified Website Traffic – What attracts people to your website is not your pretty graphics. It is the quality (of your brand story and professional) content, blog posts, social media channels, and effective search engine optimization (SEO) you have in place. This (is a targeted method (that) brings people to you instead of you hunting them down. If you tried to do this with traditional marketing, you would blast out a message to people who had no interest in hopes of getting maybe 2 out of every 100 people to visit your website.
- Entice Traffic to Become Leads – Once you have people on your website, the next step is to inspire them to provide their lead information. You do this with incentives like videos, webinars, ebooks, and white papers. The catch is that for them to get those incentives, they have to give their contact information. You will see lots highly qualified leads coming into your sales pipeline. Your “contact us” page might as well go into the archives.
- Turn Leads into Paying Customers – Turning leads into sales is the most important step in any marketing strategy. Inbound marketing uses automation to collect contact information from your leads. The automation also segments them into targeted categories and does the first follow-up with emails. You need a comprehensive lead nurturing plan and a branded email marketing strategy in place. These techniques can help you close 50 percent or more of the leads you get.
Okay, that is what it is. But, why do they call it “inbound” marketing? This type of marketing brings people into the pipeline with internal messages delivered via quality content and voluntary email membership. In contrast, traditional, or outbound, marketing pushes the message out.
Inbound Marketing Breaks through the Limitations of Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing uses the concept of blasting out a message to the largest audience possible. You see that in TV and radio advertising, cold calling, direct mail, telemarketing efforts, and campaigns sent to purchased email lists. These methods were the only options available for decades. These marketing options were expensive, time-consuming and not analytically trackable but new technological advancement have proved to be more effective. Surprisingly, many companies still use these methods for most of their marketing.
But times have changed. Today’s consumer is savvy and informed. People no longer pay much attention to unwanted marketing messages. They get up during TV commercials. They change channels when the radio commercials come on. They filter out telemarketing calls with caller ID. They ignore pop-ups and banner ads. However, this has not reduced the demand for products or services but has changed the way people look for them. Inbound marketing takes advantage of these changes.
Traditional marketing hopes to get a two to five percent response rate. That is no longer acceptable. You can now achieve a higher response rate at a faster velocity with even minimal inbound marketing.
Why choose an inbound marketing campaign over traditional?
- Generate more traffic to your website
- Get highly qualified leads from your traffic
- Convert qualified leads to paying customers much easier
- Lower marketing costs by up to 60 percent or more
- Save time and money
- Increase profits and sustainable growth
Now that you know the basics of inbound marketing, it’s time to learn how to use inbound marketing to generate more leads and more revenue for your brand or business.