Inbound marketing is about creating an engaging story of sorts and sharing it with the world.
By creating well-written, compelling content, designed specifically to attract your target audience and hold their attention, inbound marketing attracts qualified prospective clients to your company and keeps them coming back for more. By publishing the appropriate content in the right place and at the right time, your marketing will be relevant and useful to your customers, not the hard sell approach that most people detest. Bottom line, inbound marketing is something your clients and potential clients will appreciate.
Inbound marketing has been used as a high-performance marketing strategy for any sized business since 2006. Here’s how it works. Instead of the old-school outbound marketing strategies of the past like cold calling, praying for leads, or buying ineffective email lists or ads, inbound marketing is focused on creating high-quality content that attracts a targeted audience through useful, engaging information. By aligning your content with your prospects or current clients’ interests, you’ll attract inbound traffic with content that converts. From there, your customer service and follow-through will turn your clients into highly satisfied promoters of your business.
Content Creation and Distribution
First, you need to create personalized content that answers your prospects’ and customers’ questions and satisfies their needs. As you learn more over time about your leads, you can improve your messages, personalizing them to better address your target audience’s specific needs. Next, you’ll share that content via social media outlets, and email campaigns, and use analytic tools, eventually learning how to publish the right content.
Becoming a Publisher
Online marketers today are publishing useful and entertaining content regarding solutions to problems that their prospects are searching for online. Keyword research along with SEO plays a part in online publishing as well, and blogging is the principal method of publishing the information. Social media is the perfect way to share content and give it a viral boost, spreading the word and attracting more traffic. Once on your website, you can take it a step further and offer your visitors something of value related to their search like an eBook in exchange for their contact information. Now you have their permission to continue to send them helpful information via personalized email campaigns.
Guiding Your Prospects to a Buying Decision
A continuous stream of beneficial content that meets the requirements of your visitor’s buying research will help move them towards the close. That being said, the content needs to be presented at the right time. For example, after a prospect feels that they are ready to buy, they’re going to want additional information about your company before asking for a quote.
In Conclusion
Inbound marketing is more like a philosophy than an emotionless marketing strategy.
A successful inbound marketing strategy involves the use of relevant, personalized, content, not interruptive, unwanted communications. Inbound marketing is all about helping businesses attract, convert, close, and impress leads and customers through a wide range of channels including blogging, social media, SEO, and email campaigns.
In a nutshell, inbound marketing draws clients to your company by offering information they care about first instead of the opposite approach of bullying them with impersonal selling techniques. Providing exceptional, targeted information will also make you look like an expert in your field, yet another reason to contact you.
