While it may seem elementary to many of us in the marketing business, inbound marketing is still not well understood by the people who need it most: C-Level executives who make the decisions. Many executives are secretly asking themselves: What is this inbound marketing thing all about? What makes inbound leads so great? What does having a blog have to do with successful marketing? Why didn’t our other marketing efforts work? This post is a kind of primer for inbound marketing. I will try to cover the basics in a way that makes sense to executives.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is about attracting rather than seeking. There are customers (everyone is a customer, they just may not know it yet) seeking your product and others who would be seeking it if they only knew about it! It is these customers that inbound strategy focuses on.
Inbound marketing is a give and take relationship. The give part is that you provide information that is valuable to your customers and they, in turn, provide you with their business. It may be specialized information about your industry, it may be a whitepaper, a video, a blog post. Instead of a cold call which is not the ideal way to introduce your brand, the customer comes to you because they want the great content you are offering.
They key word here is content. You must have something to offer your customers that they value. While this may seem daunting, it’s actually not as hard as it seems. Think of what your customers need and/or might find interesting/cool. Is it an infographic about their industry? A whitepaper showing how they can save money? A blog post written by a respected industry expert? Any of these might provide the kind of content that your customers want.
Now it’s just a matter of creating this content in the right format, getting it onto a well-designed landing page that’s ready to capture their email in exchange for said content, reaching out to this customer-in-waiting with a call-to-action! If this all seems a bit daunting, you are not alone. Often, companies just don’t have the in-house resources, time and/or skills to do this. That is where we come in! We work with companies of all sizes to develop and implement inbound marketing strategy. A solid inbound strategy should pay for itself by generating inbound leads that convert to sales at a high rate compared to outbound campaigns. A good inbound strategy adds value at every stage of the customer relationship, matching customers to your brand and nurturing these relationships.