It is the era of digital marketing and every business is working hard to draft strategies that can take them ahead of their competitors. In digital marketing, there is repetitive mention of “inbound marketing.”
A methodology that has completely transformed how marketers strategize and perform. It is about valuing and empowering the relationship with consumers, customers, and prospects.
Inbound marketing amplifies the organization’s growth by building meaningful and lasting relationships. It is a method of “pull” marketing that replaces the conventional way of going to the customer.
This is more effective and substantially less costly than traditional marketing.
Inbound Marketing: What does it mean?
Inbound marketing is a strategic approach to creating valuable content that aligns with the needs of the target audience and builds long-term customer relationships.
It is more of a “pull” marketing approach where strategists grow the business by building lasting relationships with customers, prospects, and clients.
Unlike the traditional outbound way, it focuses on creating reasons for the customer to come to you. It is done by posting and maintaining valuable content.
The marketing team these days always tries to keep an eye on top search engine optimization techniques and SEO services, which can create a difference in their marketing performance.
Most team leaders get hold of HubSpot services to simplify their inbound marketing strategy. HubSpot tools help in generating keywords that need to be prioritized to drive traffic and conversions. Along with that, they give recommendations on how to optimize the site for SEO, ranked in order of precedence to show which optimizations will have the most impact on your performance in search.
HubSpot divides the process into four major steps:
- Attracting customers
- Converting customers
- Closing deals
- Delighting customers
Inbound Marketing Content Types:
These are the common type of inbound marketing content. They are all about being-
- Blogs
- Infographics
- Videos
- Research
- Slide shows / Presentations
- Social media
What is the Importance of Inbound Marketing:
Inbound marketing basically educates, informs, and convinces prospects to interact with your brands’ services and products. It makes them spend money on products and services that the brand offer.
Here four reasons why inbound marketing techniques are critical for the growth of the business.
- Cost-Effective: Unlike the traditional outbound way where a lot of money is spent on large hoardings, billboards, advertising, etc. inbound marketing only requires a website and content to get the message across. Apart from being cost-effective, they are more engaging and retain customers.
- Builds Brand Awareness and Brand Authority: Methods such as SEO and content marketing help in taking the brand to the highest levels. Blogging and content creation helps brands in taking the upper hand over other competitors. Along with creating brand awareness it also engages and retains the customer.
- Lead Nurturing Enhancement: Everybody that comes to your website does not come with the intention of buying your product. They are here to do some research. This is where good and attractive content does it work. It attracts customers and convinces them to stay for a long time. Inbound marketing involves the nurturing of such visitors on a step-by-step basis until they are ready to buy.
- Amplifies Trust and Credibility: It is very known that brand awareness brings brand coverage. This will build better credibility. Eventually, it will lead to better trust in the brand and customers would always prefer it over others.
Essentials of a perfect inbound marketing strategy.
- Specific Goals: Clear goals are essential for inbound strategy. It is important to set out specific requirements with regard to KPIs, traffic, lead generation, etc. After integrating all the details regarding budget, resources, and timeframes, a final game plan should be sketched out.
- Buyer Personas: Buyer personas are a key marketing tool that depicts a general representation of your customers. Many businesses are doing HubSpot CRM onboarding to fetch additional benefits the HubSpot “make my persona” tool offers. It betters the content marketing strategy and helps produce content that is targeted to a particular user group.
- Website: The brands’ website is something like a digital front shop. It is important to make sure that the website is inbound ready so that lead generation becomes easy. Clear CTA’s on landing pages and easy-to-navigate websites with relatable and easy-to-understand content always stand out. HubSpot landing pages tool is used to create and test beautiful landing pages that generate leads and look great on any device.
Why not Traditional Marketing Methods?
These days it is not often to get excited about traditional marketing methods. Times have changed, and digital marketing has taken over the market space. Hoardings and billboards are no longer that useful.
Apart from being an expensive method, it does not guarantee that message is delivered to the public.
Reasons why traditional marketing in current times is a major no-no.
- Less Efficiency: Traditional marketing uses methods that can garner the public attention towards them. To execute the plan large hoardings, billboards, and other sources of media are used extensively. But they do not offer efficiency. Nobody knows how many people saw that and how many got converted into a lead after that. There is no efficiency and nothing can be measured.
- Time-Consuming: Compared to inbound marketing techniques, traditional marketing can take longer to execute and refine. Producing an advertisement on print media takes a lot of time and goes through multiple rounds of edits. Other than this, the installation and distribution take extra time. In digital marketing, all these hassles
do not take place. - Inefficient Data Segmentation: In today’s time it is essential for businesses to know about the tiniest details of their campaigns. This thing can’t be analyzed in the traditional ways. It does not have the same ability to target and sub-segment as digital.
- Less Audience: The bitter truth is traditional marketing is gradually losing its audience. The way consumers interact with the media and the kind of media, both have gone through a major change. Traditional marketing outlets are learning to adjust to a new generation of customers.
How Inbound Marketing is More Powerful than Traditional Marketing.
From above one thing is very clear and that is Inbound marketing represents the future of advertising. Although traditional marketing is still useful and relevant in some situations, it can not match the level of the preciseness of inbound marketing techniques.
From specifically targeted emails to SEO generic content, inbound marketing techniques cover all of the. While there is comfort in hanging on to old methods, it is highly recommended to shift to better efficient techniques.
Inbound marketing specifically harnesses the power and reach of the internet as well as social media to connect with a global audience, one thing that traditional marketing can not offer.
Apart from just publishing the relevant content, there is no risk of material becoming outdated and irrelevant in an inbound way. Whereas in traditional ways the wastage rate keeps increasing.
Even small businesses with a limited budget can run effective inbound marketing campaigns by creating content that speaks to the interest and needs of the target audience
Understanding inbound techniques is a tough nut to crack. Although principles are easy to understand, the overall application requires systematic efforts and help from experts that have relevant experience.
With inbound marketing, users will experience a valuable and high return on their investment that goes far beyond what can be achieved with traditional marketing. It is the ultimate powerhouse for digital marketing solutions.