Running a Super-Effective Inbound Marketing Campaign - The Ultimate Guide

Everyone these days is talking about inbound marketing, content marketing, trust marketing, permission marketing and so on.

But have you gotten the chance to decipher these terms in detail?

If you haven’t already, don’t worry, this detailed guide has got your back.

All these terms share the same core element:

Relevant content for a targeted audience.

In other words, content within context.

Those 3 words form the core essence of what's called “inbound marketing”.

But how do business owners and marketers like you implement this form of pull-marketing?

How to start?

What do you need?

What’s the first step?

These are some common questions in the mind of someone new to this arena.

But here’s where the confusion ends.

Being a part of a growing inbound marketing agency in the UAE, I’ve heard all sorts of rumours, confused statements, misquotations and ambiguous chatter about inbound marketing.

In this mega-article I’m going to completely de-construct inbound marketing and dissect every element, definition-by-definition, step-by-step to help you wrap your head completely around this topic.

If your attention span allows it, by the end of this article, you’ll look at marketing with a brand new perspective.

What I’m about to teach you is the form of marketing your customers expect, not what they abhor.

It all begins with trust.

First, trusting this marketing technique to help you cut through the clutter and generate leads in a systematic manner, and then;

Instilling within your target audience a feeling of trust and goodwill.

Let’s start by identifying the current marketing/advertising landscape.

While doing some casual reading, I just came across this staggering statistic:

In today’s scenario, an average person encounters more than 5,000 instances of advertisements & brand exposures per day.

Per day!

This statistic alone makes it sacrosanct for businesses to cultivate trust among clients in order to sell their products or services.

And one of the best ways to establish trust between you and potential customers is to create amazing content that cannot be found elsewhere.

Honestly speaking, aren’t you tired of seeing and running the same old pushy ads that hardly generate quality leads?

Truth be told, the internet is increasingly getting cluttered with all sorts of competitors & ads.

That itself is a worthy reason to adopt inbound marketing and escape the advertorial rat-race.

Why spend all those bucks on ineffective and pushy sales messages in a cluttered marketplace, when you could instead define your target audience and create exclusive content for them?

After all, traditional (outbound) marketing is disruptive & pushy.

It’s defined by an aggressive selling stance that has the potential to turn off a lot of quality leads.

Tactics like cold calls, direct mail, unsegmented email blasts and spammy social media ads are simply diluting your brand image and making you look like “one of the many others”. 

Then there’s Inbound marketing - focused towards the right set of people, by addressing their problems, providing solutions and nurturing them into your ultimate brand ambassadors.

If outbound creates a push effect, inbound creates a pull, helping you generate leads by only publishing relevant content and utilizing the power of content marketing, website optimization and analytics.

Although flyers & unsolicited emails might have been popular in the past, their effectiveness is fast going down the drain.

Now, every time consumers get an uncalled-for sales call, they’ll lose interest and start looking for ways to end the conversation.

Businesses who rely on outbound marketing might hunt down a potential prospect using social media or email and immediately begin pushing their products, without sparing some thought to build a relationship and earn their prospect’s trust.

Where’s the authority? The confidence? The ingenuity?

More importantly, where’s the trust?

For browsing ease, I’ve divided this ultimate inbound marketing guide into 6 parts as follows:

1. The Definition of Inbound Marketing.
2. Why Should You Adopt Inbound Marketing?
3. How Does Inbound Marketing Work?
4. The Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Creating an Inbound Marketing Strategy
5. Inbound Marketing vs Content Marketing: Differences & Similarities
6. Case Study Example: Using Inbound Marketing to Increase School Admissions

Read the complete article here.