Inbound Marketing as a solution to Traditional Interruptive Ads
Hugo César Sanchez Garcia
Providing Neighborhood Nourishment Through Empowerment and Equitable Opportunity Development
It's a familiar story... Whether you're shopping online, watching a YouTube video, browsing through articles or checking your email a pesky advertisement makes its way to interrupt your leisurely afternoon. It's particularly annoying when the ad is not in any way relevant to what you were engaged with, is in no way engaging or doesn't in any way address your needs in the first place. With such constant interruptions, people have turned to solutions like adblockers in order to circumvent these traditional forms of marketing. In an article by Marketo, they go on to explain that according to a study done by the 2015 PageFair Ad blocking report over 200 million people worldwide have turned to adblockers as their desperate solution to rid themselves of this unwanted content.
When we think of traditional forms of Marketing the common culprits are cold calling, cold emails, and interruptive ads. All of those methods are marketer centric, don't take the consumer's individual needs into account and ultimately shatter the potential relationship with the customer before it even begins. In addition to being irritating, the shotgun approach of traditional marketing tends to have a lower ROI for such efforts.
Behold the Solution!!!
Inbound marketing is the response to the market's direct dissatisfaction with traditional forms of marketing. Although more subtle, inbound marketing is present in most forms of media consumption. Most commonly it can be found in SEO (search engine optimization), blogging, and attractions. All of these can be described as customer-centric meaning that they recognize the consumer's persona before they find their way to the consumer. Inbound marketing is more appealing and makes it easier for brands to develop awareness because rather than buying a person's attention it earns it by offering highly engaging content. According to research done by Marketo they state that 55% of respondents agreed that online articles positively influence their purchase decision. That's increasingly higher than the roughly 20% agreement rate with traditional forms of marketing. To put financially it also typically has a higher ROI than traditional forms of marketing as well because all efforts are focused.
So how does it work???
Pioneers of inbound marketing, HubSpot, have created a simple streamlined best practices of inbound marketing methodology in order to communicate their methods well and help transitions marketers out of their antiquated ways.
Use Buyers Personas
Know who you're trying to reach - everything you do must be tied back to who your personas are. It's important to note that buyer's personas need to be based on research and not intuition. This will ultimately ensure higher levels of accuracy.
Use the Buyers Journey
Make sure every interaction your persona has with your organization is tailored to where they are in the buyer's journey
- The Awareness Phase
- The Consideration Phase
- The Decision Phase
Create Remarkable Content
Content that tailored to both who your personas are and where they are in the buyer's journey is inbound fuel.
Leverage Your Content
Make that content available for them to find and to serve your business goals: content distribution is what provides the context for your content
In order to move away from irritable methods of marketing, as marketers, it's crucial that we transition into being more customer focused. The days of "if we build it, they will come" are over so we need to be more intentional about putting the right information and content in front of the right people. We can no longer assume that everyone will want or products, it's not financially or socially viable. It's not enough to know who you're trying to reach, you have to know what they have to see and have the methods in place to deliver it well!!