Who should I even market to?
Brett Budos
Student at Western Washington University, Business Administration and Marketing
Just like with any task at hand for a company, results are key. Whatever the market is that you happen to be working in, the chances that everyone wants that product or service are near zero. But by conducting market analyses, studying secondary data, understanding where your target market happens to be, and a whole slew of other things, you can narrow down that broad group of people into a smaller group of people that are more likely to become paying customers. The act of doing so is known as inbound marketing and here is why it is so crucial to understand and utilize it.
Why not just market to everyone?
To understand what is working well, you always look at the data. With this in mind, we can view every customer as a ratio between the dollars spent acquiring them and the revenue or profit they give the company. Reducing the first part of that formula will grant the company more revenue. Inbound Marketing therefore makes this price go down, cuts down on less irrelevant data, and grants us higher-quality data to sift through that promotes the best future decisions. And this is just on the money side. It also promotes a more honest marketing approach that aims to genuinely help people looking for your product whether they think they need it or not. This can then translate to a better brand reputation!
Inbound VS Outbound Marketing
Now that you understand the benefits of inbound marketing compared to general widespread marketing, what is outbound marketing and how does it differ?
Outbound marketing is...
Whereas inbound marketing is...
领英推荐
What else should I know about?
Now that you understand how relevant and crucial inbound marketing is, where can you take it from here? A very useful subset of inbound marketing I would like to mention is content marketing. While very similar to inbound marketing (after all, it is a subset), content marketing is specific to the act of generating healthy content that is promoted to a smaller, more relevant target audience. While sales and generating new leads are very important, CM is about getting the brand's name out there while instilling trust in the company across many ads and promotions that this target market will continuously see over time. In short, inbound marketing assists the customer's entire journey while CM is focused on the generation and distribution of content meant to drive traffic.
How should I invest in Content Marketing?
At the beginning of my article, I touched on how inbound marketing is simply more profitable. But, did you know that content marketing can yield 3x the traffic while costing 62% less? Here are some specific reasons as to why your company should invest in it!