Inbound Marketing. What's the Big Deal?

Inbound Marketing has changed the way we look at marketing forever. Inbound marketing has shattered all of the old tried and true, conventional and traditional manuals and playbooks. It is the most important and relevant change for small business owners in our history. Yea. It’s that big of a deal.

So what is it?

Wikipedia defines inbound marketing this way:

Inbound marketing refers to marketing activities that bring visitors in, rather than marketers having to go out to get customers’ attention. Inbound marketing earns the attention of customers, makes the company easy to be found, and draws traffic to the website by producing interesting content.

In other words — it’s all about attention and awareness. If your prospect can’t find you in all of the noise out there – and you have to go hunting (outbound marketing) for all of your business – you are in deep, deep trouble and headed for disaster.

Content. Content. Content. It doesn’t matter if it’s a FaceBook post, a blog post, or an Instagram photo – a huge part of inbound marketing is all about creating and delivering excellent and valuable content. Here’s the catch — you can’t talk about yourself, your product, or your service. This is far more difficult than it sounds.

Video. Whether it’s a YouTube video you casually uploaded or a LIVE stream on FaceBook or Periscope – video combined with mobile have to be a very big part of your content creation.

Inbound marketing requires you to change the way you look at your website too. 

• Your website must be responsive. If it doesn’t look as good and function as well on a desktop, laptop, tablet, and phone – epic fail. It’s time to fix it.
• Your website is no longer a sounding board for how great you are and how fantastic your products and services are compared to your competitors. No one cares. 
• Your website must be super user-friendly. Scroll scroll scroll…no more click click click. Your prospects and customers are going to be scrolling your website on their phone – make sure they enjoy it.
• Your website must be the hub of your entire internet presence. This is where it all starts. You post a fantastic and valuable blog post – that post gets pushed out to FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Instagram, and anywhere else your social media strategy points to. Oh yea – let’s not forget a call to action – subtle and everywhere. Another difficult process to master.
• SEO. Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a big part of an effective inbound marketing strategy. Coming to YOU from a search engine is like a little nugget of gold falling into your lap. Your website must be optimized for these search engines like Google and Bing to find and dish out to all of those people searching for whatever it is you offer. 

A sales funnel is a big deal. You must create one. I don’t care if you sell donuts or boats. It sorta works like this:

You attract someone to your website via that high quality, excellent, and valuable content…but they don’t land on “your website”…they land on one of the many landing pages you have created for specific purposes and audiences. Bingo. They are here. Your landing page is so awesome (great content) they give you their email address (and maybe more). Their name goes into a database of not only potential customers…but sorted by various relevant criteria. Your sales funnel begins to drip…dripping content to these prospects in such a way that eventually they move down the funnel and contact YOU or just outright buy from you. Once they are a customer…yea…you guessed it…they go into yet another sales funnel. Rinse and repeat.

That’s sorta how it works.

Summary:

So inbound marketing is all about standing out from the crowd with spectacular content, making people aware you exist, and providing the environment necessary for these prospects to either buy – now — or slide down that sales funnel to the next stage. In other words – THEY COME TO YOU. 

Once you get started and turn the spigot on – it barely trickles. A prospect here…a purchase there. After you figure this stuff out (or hire someone to do it for you) – you get a nice flow of new prospects and clients. So while you are delivering valuable content to everyone your competitor is out there still telling people how great they are and how you suck. Guess who wins?

Thank you so much for taking the time to read. If you have some thoughts feel free to post a comment below.

Dennis Lynn
DennisLynnOnline