What is Inbound Marketing? It is the combined use of different tools to attract more people to your site, which in turn results in more sells and higher returns

Inbound Marketing is about making yourself easily found in order to  draw customers to your website. The idea of Inbound Marketing is opposed to “Outbound Marketing” where you push your company out to your target market via ads, direct mail, cold calls, etc. In other words, Inbound is about “earning” your way in by offering relevant content about your product, as opposed to “buying” your way in, in unsolicited ways

While no method  is better than the other and the two should co-exist in your marketing plan, there are two main reasons you should incorporate Inbound Marketing to your strategy:

  1. Over 75% of people research the product online before buying
  2. People are overloaded with information: emails, direct mail, ads, telemarketing so they tend to tune out unsolicited messages

So because in inbound marketing it is the customer who is actively looking for your product rather than you pushing it out to them, Inbound Marketing is more efficient and yields better results in the mid to long term.

If Inbound Marketing is about making yourself easy to be found, how do you go about it? You disseminate valuable and relevant information about your product and company in as many appropriate sources as you can, so that when your potential customer is doing their research, your product shows up for them. A few examples of inbound actions:

Blog Posts

If you’re a doctor this can be easy: just post information about treatments, or questions that your patients frequently ask. But you can also do this if you sell towels or socks because blogs don’t have to be informational. They can be fun too: if you sell towels you can publish towel folding techniques, if you sell socks you can blog photos of socks in the middle ages. It’s just a matter of finding an angle that fits your product and brand.

Videos

Create videos –  creating a video can be a little more involved but depending on your product you can do a video using text and photos, or if you’ve ever had a TV appearance you can post that too.

E-books

E-books – again, this isn’t just for content-heavy products. A clothes designer can produce an e-book with their newest collection 

E-mail Marketing

 E-mail marketing: while this is also an outbound technique, if you post your email on your website, it is yet another page that search engines have to show for your website. We have a number of clients who received visits through old promotions archived on their website. 

Landing Pages

Landing pages –are literally pages where people “land” from other sources: a promotion, an email marketing campaign, an Adwords Ad, etc. Or they can just be created for a specific topic. In this way, blog posts double up as landing pages.

SEO

SEO – this one is self-explanatory. The more you appear and the higher you rank in search engines, the more chances you have of being found by your customers

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing – this is about marketing your product in social networks so that people find about you through their friends and friends of friends. 

Internet Marketing

Internet marketing – this includes putting your business in other marketing venues such as Google maps, Foursquare, iTunes, etc. 

As you can see, it is about being in as many relevant places as possible, with the appropriate message to lure your customers to your product, as opposed to buying your way in in unsolicited ways.

One important takeaway is that at the center of it all, is, of course, your website. That’s why it is important that it is profesionally designed, constantly updated, and used as a strategic tool, as opposed to a static marketing tool that is designed once and forgotten.

In the context of Inbound Marketing, your website is the hub where all other marketing actions come together.

We can help at each step of the way, determining the best “venues” for your product (Blogs, Email marketing, SEO, Social Media, etc.) and creating content accordingly

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