This is a guest post by Sneha Rastogi who works at LinkBuildingWorks, and today is going to explain us about inbound marketing technique, how it is different from outbound marketing and how it can help your business. I am sure you will learn something new through this post.
It is a common understanding among all marketers that promotional practices need to be changed according to the prevailing business environment. Still they look out for one such solution that assures to bring customers to them in a consistent manner.
Though there are several forms of marketing but one which has got attention off late and is becoming a topic of discussion is Inbound Marketing. There is so much talk about its potential to attract customers towards a business or brand and leading it to earn profits.
Organizations have started realizing high-efficiency of inbound marketing and some have even adopted it to gain benefits. If it continues to deliver the desired results, Inbound Marketing can expect to find a permanent place in the marketing plan of businesses.
Let us take a closer look at it.
What is Inbound Marketing?
A marketing effort that drives customers to find more about the companies/products or services they are interested in and not the marketers doing all efforts to reach the customers is known as inbound marketing.
It consists of a range of techniques, all of which are focused on attracting customers through relationship building.
Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing
Inbound marketing involves applying those techniques or tools of promotion where customers find the promoter/marketer. This is in sharp contrast to Outbound marketing where marketers try various means (Advertising, telemarketing, direct mail, trade shows, etc) to reach their prospective customers. While OM targets a broad range of audience, the approach of IM is towards specific but qualified customers.
Types of Inbound Marketing
There are different ways of undertaking this kind of marketing which include:
Blog – A blog is an efficient way to give related information to the users and set up a relationship with them. Nowadays organizations are willingly creating their blogs to cater to the information needs of their customers who then visit the official sites.
Videos – Adding videos to a site to promote and explain the products helps a lot as users find videos more appealing.
White Papers – As a piece of information that help readers to gain understanding about a company and its products, White Papers prove to be a productive marketing tool.
EBook – It is another effective way used in inbound marketing to create awareness among the target audience. By offering Free EBook a company can get traffic through links embedded in it.
Webinars – The interactive element of the webinars make them a highly profitable technique that can drive sales. With it a business can reach a large audience simultaneously and promote its products or services.
SEO – It involves optimizing a website to boost its ranking in search engines so that customers can find it easily on search results. A top ranked site attracts more traffic and therefore SEO is an important part of inbound marketing.
Social Networks – With users making extensive use of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. marketers have realized that promotion over these platforms helps establishing mutually beneficial relationship with the customers.
Benefits of Inbound Marketing
Is Cost Effective
In comparison to Outbound Marketing which involves huge investment, inbound marketing is less expensive but offers high ROI.
Focused Targeting
Inbound Marketing targets interested customers and thus marketers create content to meet their specific needs. This makes it efficient as it saves time and effort.
Leads to Conversions
Inbound Marketing helps meet the sales targets as the various techniques used lead to an increase in conversions.
The efficiency of inbound marketing is higher because it keeps its focus entirely on the users interests and presents the content so which incites them to take action. Also it appeals more to the present day tech savvy customers by providing the information they are looking forward to. All these factors have contributed to its growing popularity and it is being regarded as an effective form to target customers and increase leads.
Let us know your thought on this post. Have you ever heard about inbound marketing strategy? Have you or your friend used inbound marketing for its business? Please take a moment and use the comment form below to tell us that.
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Absolutely fascinating article. As a marketing professional in my opinion in bound marketing has yet a lot to offer. It is a direct and logical consequence of the web 2.0 that allows customers and clients to learn more and more about a company and a product so that marketing effots should be placed at helping people become more involved with the organization.
Yes, Inbound Marketing is very important for low promotion budget business owner. Inbound Marketing is very effective if you want to get success with your online promotion. FYI I’m one of the certified inbound marketing 🙂
Thanks for sharing about Inbound Marketing here Sneha.
Well it is not only for those who have a low budget. Even if your company is a large one, you’d like to have couple of dozens of new customers, won’t you?! Besides, inbound marketing helps to build relationships and trust, and both of these components are essential for successful growth of a business.
Hi John.
I totally agree with you – it is really important to build relationships, and even great companies try to do their best for doing this. No matter whether your company is big or small, inbound marketing is important, no matter whether it is cheap or expensive.
Interesting article Sneha. But there is something that stands out in my opinion and that is: there needs to be some sort of outbound marketing to promote the various types of inbound marketing. A company will still require marketing personnel to help drive traffic to videos, blogs, ebook offers; or they may engage in a PPC campaign for this and then there also needs to be some sort of promotion for webinars.
SEO is also a form of OB marketing as marketers are engaging in a specific -albeit technical- technique to garner interest in a company or product which ultimately is a form of advertising in itself.
I think the distinction between the 2 types of marketing are rather fine and they do overlap.
Thanks!
Yeah, I am too in favour of inbound marketing. It sometimes brings more fruitful results than any other methods of marketing, but only if done in a proper way.
I believe that inbound marketing is way better than outbound because the potential customers already know and are familiar with your product/services unlike outbound which you need to pursue them that sometimes lead to irritated and unsatisfied customers.
I couldn’t agree more on the 1st two benefits. Regardless if you’re a small or big enterprise, you do your best efforts to lower your costs and doing inbound marketing does just that.
Inbound marketing is all about building customer trust. If you can keep the trust by providing quality services then definitely inbound marketing goes in your favor.
Exactly Conroy! customers trust, providing their needs, building a relationship with your customers and giving them satisfactory result of your performance are the main objectives of an inbound marketers.
Inbound marketing it’s much more important than outbound. The reason is that the conversion rate it’s much higher in inbound marketing because people are coming to you and they are looking for information that you provide, so they are getting what they are looking for!
Inbound marketing is important to have in mind when you set up your business plan. So often people start their business and think they have to chase down the customer or follower when in fact you can simply direct them to you and make them want more! Great post – thanks for the information.
It seems to me that inbound marketing strategy, and outbound have alot in common. To an extent in my opinion you have to do the outbound marketing in order to get the inbound. Offcourse from what I can tell, you don’t need to do alot of outbound marketing, to get alot of inbound marketing, and that appears to be the key to a successful inbound marketing strategy.
-Jean