Why Inbound Marketing Is the Key to Marketing Success

What is inbound marketing and why has it become so valuable? As opposed to outbound marketing that focuses on direct sales, inbound marketing transparently highlights how a brand can solve particular problems with comprehensive information. When you start communication with a prospect who’s already interested in you, then you’re already that much closer to converting them. So, inbound marketing has better ROI, establishes brand authority, and builds long-lasting relationships with customers.

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is a form of marketing that focuses on drawing potential customers to your brand using creative ways to attract their attention. It is the exact opposite of outbound marketing that involves pushing a brand or product to prospects in the hope of generating leads. Examples of inbound marketing strategies include content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, and branding. Inbound marketing helps you to achieve your business goals by:

• Increasing site traffic with high-quality and informative content
• Growing engagement rates with your prospects
• Driving conversions by solving problems rather than selling
• Expanding your reach

...and much more.

Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing is a type of advertising where a business initiates the conversation by promoting its services to potential clients. Examples of outbound marketing include:

• Radio ads 
• TV commercials
• Newspaper ads
• Trade Shows
• Cold calls 

Outbound marketing ROI is difficult to track because it focuses on wide broadcasting of the message that limits metrics only to the number of people reached. You cannot know the exact number of people who took the action you intended after consuming your ad. It is also less profitable compared to inbound marketing, because it takes a whole lot more work to sell to someone who isn’t interested in the first place. 

With inbound marketing, the customer finds you when they need you, because you have the right content available. This content can include:

• Blog articles
• Ebooks
• How to guides
• Videos
• Whitepapers 
• Organic social media marketing
• Community building

While inbound marketing is intended to pull potential customers to a brand without direct selling, outbound marketing involves pushing a company’s products and services towards prospects regardless of whether they are interested.

The Advantages of Using Inbound Marketing

Applying inbound marketing in your overall marketing strategy will help you achieve your business goals faster. By providing actionable content that empathizes with your audience and offers solutions to their problems, you will inherently increase your conversion rates and improve ROI.  

Reduced costs

Inbound marketing enables businesses to generate leads at a lesser cost because the buying process begins with a prospect who was already interested in working with you due to particular content. In fact, inbound marketing costs 61% less compared to outbound marketing in terms of lead generation. When you use a marketing strategy that provides better results, then you can generate more revenue and grow your business faster.

Better quality leads

Since potential clients look for you when they need the service or product that you offer, the closing rates for inbound marketing are higher. The leads you generate with inbound marketing aren’t as wide of an audience like a radio ad, so they resonate much more closely with who you’re targeting. Better quality leads = more conversions.  

Builds brand authority

Inbound marketing is the best way to establish yourself as an expert in your industry. By producing pieces of content that elaborate on the solutions to specific problems of your target audience, you gain brand authority. Potential customers will see you as the perfect business to engage with, because you provide authentic and transparent information. Brand authority is also essential to long-term company success.

Long-term customer engagement

Developing a long-term relationship is one of the major goals of inbound marketing. To do this, you need to provide useful content that helps both your potential and existing clients along the different stages of the sales funnel. Your target audience will trust you more if they end up solving their problems using your services as you had promised. They can turn into brand ambassadors and promote your products to their friends because you impressed them.  

Better ROI

Inbound marketing requires less input compared to outbound marketing because most of the work is done using your own content, meaning you don’t need to continually pay for outbound ads. Since your prospects come to you instead of you looking for them, your ROI will be higher because you do a smaller amount of work to attract the lead. 

Common Inbound Marketing Methods

If you only heard about inbound marketing in the past and already tried to implement it, you’re not alone. Many companies start with inbound marketing because it’s a cheaper option and fail in the implementation and the optimization process since it’s a complex process. Nonetheless, learning about the most common inbound marketing methods in detail can bring you into this undiscovered world. 

Content marketing

Content marketing is an effective way to educate your target audience on the ways to solve their challenges and pain-points. When you answer questions in advance and give transparent information (like competitor comparisons) or even admit your flaws, customers will trust you more. It also markets 24/7 vs. having to pay for ads since once you upload an article, anyone can access as long as your website is functioning. Paid ads, on the other hand, can only run when you pay the provider. 

SEO

Optimizing your articles for search engines is a form of inbound marketing, because it aligns Google results with user’s search intent. Organic traffic and high rankings means more website visitors who aren’t pressured to contact you. SEO also focuses on explanatory content instead of selling. In any case, focus on creating content that has natural keyword integration. Forcing keywords into your content (keyword stuffing) makes your articles hard to read and may hurt your ranking on search engines. 

Social media

Social media marketing enables you to interact with your prospects in a personalized manner which builds a strong relationship with followers. By producing content that educates your audience, they will be drawn into your brand and turn into leads for your business. Leverage social media to get as many leads as possible, because it’s one of the most cost-effective marketing methods out there. Creating your profile and posting is free. All it takes is your time to get to know people out there and begin interacting with them. 

Email marketing

When site visitors join your email subscriber list, they turn into leads that may one day be your customers. Those who are on your list have voluntarily subscribed, so there’s something of value they were interested in even before you try to sell to them. That extra step of interest means that they’re much more likely to convert.

Video marketing

Video marketing involves using videos to promote and market your products or increase brand awareness. Videos are often more engaging and bring emotions into focus. They are also easier to consume compared to written content that may be boring or lengthy to read. Create informative videos around the solutions to the challenges of your prospects.  

Community building

Community building involves forming an engaging brand presence among potential and existing clients by actively interacting with them. In social media groups, you can provide actionable content that helps members improve their lives. Consider how facebook works off of groups nowadays, and how admins can monetize that in a way that people find value.

Marketing automation

Marketing automation improves efficiency within marketing departments by automating redundant tasks such as email marketing,and social media posting. Moreover, it also improves customer experience through personalization of messages sent to both prospects and existing clients. By installing chatbots into your website, site visitors can get answers to their questions at any time of the day, making your customer service reliable for when inbound marketing leads come in.

Get Help with Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

Now that you have learned the benefits of inbound marketing for your business, what are you going to do next? Let me help you achieve your business goals by creating a formidable inbound marketing strategy that your prospects will find enticing. I will define the challenges and pain points of your target clients and propose inbound marketing strategies to improve your services by doing the following: 

• A comprehensive marketing audit
• Personalize content development production
• Sales funnel creation
• Identify buying obstacles and improve customer journey
• Marketing automation & CRM integration