Inbound Marketing is a methodology that helps to draw customers into your business instead of you reaching out to them. When focusing on inbound marketing, you create helpful content that will attract qualified customers to your website. This content is usually in the form of a blog post, social media, or SEO. The idea of inbound is to present your business in a helpful way compared to the traditional outbound methodology of marketing. Inbound marketing forgoes the ways of the pushy selling techniques that consumers are all too familiar with. The content that you create will help to solve a customers problem or provide them with additional information that they are looking for.
The term inbound marketing was first coined by, Hubspot, and they have continued to help expand the understanding and methodology of inbound marketing. They have created the process of inbound marketing as attracting, converting, closing, and then delighting customers. Hubspot offers a lot of online courses to help learn inbound, this article is actually a form of inbound in itself. You can see some of their courses and offerings by clicking here.
Benefits of Inbound Marketing:
Increase Trust – This is one of the biggest benefits of inbound marketing. When customers view your content they gain valuable information, whether they knew they needed it or not. This helps consumers view your brand as a place where they can find useful content and not just spend money, ensuring they will return to your site over others.
Higher Quality Traffic – By creating specific content, you can draw in a more specific consumer demographic to your website. This will help turn your traffic into potential sales and revenue for your customers by bringing in less consumers that aren’t interested in your products/services.
It’s Inexpensive – That’s right, it’s cheap, at least for the most part. It doesn’t cost your company any extra overhead to produce videos, blogs, and social media content. Usually someone on the marketing team can take care of this, another option would be to bring on an unpaid intern to help create and manage this type of content.
Lasting Impact – Inbound marketing can help to create a lasting impact on your consumers. If a video or blog post stood out to them, they might bring it up in conversation or share it on social media. This again will help to bring more consumers to your website. It will also leave the customer thinking about your brand, and hopefully bring them back to your website.
It is important to note that success with inbound marketing campaigns will not come overnight, it will take some time. Make sure to keep creating content even if there is not a significant change in website traffic. After you have started to produce inbound marketing campaigns, it is important to analyze the results. This will help you better understand what types of content your consumers are most interested in, and what you can tailor future content to be about.
How Inbound Marketing May Be Used:
Since inbound marketing is so broad, there are a number of ways that it can be used in a business setting. Below are some examples of how to use Inbound Marketing.
An online kitchen store has been seeing a drop in customers that are visiting their site. They would like to draw more qualified customers to their website. Their marketing director created a few options to attempt to attract more qualified visitors. They suggested:
– Write blogs on their favorite items in the store
– Produce videos of new recipes
– Send out a weekly newsletter with cooking tips
A small marketing firm is trying to consider new ways to inform its customers on the benefits and services that they offer. The firm decides to:
– Post customer testimonials on social media
– Write blog posts about current marketing trends
– Create downloadable ebooks
– Bi-weekly web seminars
Takeaways
Inbound marketing has grown to become an important aspect of the marketing mix for an e-commerce business. It helps to attract high quality visitors to your site and creates a better relationship with these visitors. This in turn will help to increase sales and revenue for your business, all being done at an affordable price. Not sure where to start? Reach out to our team and we would love to help you out.
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