What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a strategy for attracting customers to your business. It contrasts with traditional outbound marketing, which requires you to actively seek new customers.
A good inbound marketing strategy will make your brand or product highly visible. A large marketing budget is unnecessary as it is considerably cheaper than the more traditional advertising routes.
Web pages, blogs, and social media can all be part of an inbound marketing strategy. The most important thing is to share compelling content that meets your customers’ needs and interests.
A successful inbound marketing strategy operates as a two-way street. Your business needs to put effort into getting to know your customers and their likes, needs and interests. In return, customers can use your content (such as blogs or videos) to learn something new or develop a particular skill. It should encourage them to seek further information, services or products, leading them to give you business.
Once your customers interact with your business or make purchases, you can provide them with additional content that interests them. This will help generate future sales.
The expectations of inbound marketing
With an excellent inbound marketing strategy, your business, services, and products should attract potential customers’ attention and earn their loyalty. It should allow smaller companies to compete alongside more prominent, recognisable brands. You should expect to be converting visits into sales.
Regularly updating your website and publishing content such as blog posts or YouTube videos are ways to maintain almost real-time contact with your customers. Ensure your content invites visitors to like your Facebook page or respond to your Twitter feeds.
Inbound marketing, therefore, expects you to generate large numbers of customers through visits to online content. It is all without the expense or time required for more traditional forms of marketing and advertising. However, there are some realities of inbound marketing to consider.
The Realities of Inbound Marketing
To achieve maximum success, your inbound marketing content and strategy must be constantly analyzed. Regular time will need to be allocated to keeping webpages, blogs, and YouTube posts fresh and relevant so that they interest your returning visitors and potential customers.
It can overload your already busy marketing department, but it’s not always enough to work to justify creating another paid role within your business. You can overcome it by outsourcing some work, such as blog posts.
As a new business or new to inbound marketing, do not expect immediate results; success does not happen overnight. A company may need between six and twelve months for its online presence to become embedded, recognised and visited regularly. Once it does, you might need a more significant sales force to cope with the demand. This will, of course, need to be budgeted for.
Finally, once your inbound marketing generates visitors, you must meet expectations by providing the products and services. It will help you build relationships with your customers and create positivity around your online presence.
Contact us today and get professional advice on how to make the most of your inbound marketing efforts.