HubSpot defines inbound marketing as, “...a focus on creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be. By aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests, you naturally attract inbound traffic that you can then convert, close, and delight over time.” Essentially, inbound marketing is the process of putting out quality content and optimizing and understanding your customer to make it easier for them to find you when searching for your business, product, and/or service. It's all about finding and fixing a problem. Tactics used in inbound marketing include social media marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization, website design, blogging, and more. An inbound marketing agency can help you understand the relationship between all of these tactics and help use them successfully. Read more about outbound vs inbound marketing in our blog post!
1. Attract High Quality Visits & Leads
Not all traffic is created equal. It's better to have 1,000 good visitors (those that are more likely to convert into a lead and then a customer) than 10,000 visits by those that will likely never become leads or customers. With a strategic inbound marketing campaign, you can target your content to those that actually want to hear what you have to say. These are people that are likely even looking for your business, product, or service already. Stop "spraying and praying" with your marketing budget and start targeting those that are looking for you.
2. Learn More About Your Visitors
One of our first questions to potential clients looking at adding inbound marketing services to their marketing campaign is, how much do you know about your current website visitors. Typically the answer is - very little. One of our favorite features about utilizing the HubSpot software is the insight that you can gain into your visitors and leads. Understanding what they're looking at, looking for, calls-to-actions that they're acting on, and how often they're returning can give great insight into who they are, what the problem is that they're trying to solve, and how to best market to them. So how about you - what do you know about your website visitors?
3. Save Money
According to HubSpot, the average lead from inbound marketing services costs about 61% LESS than an average lead from outbound marketing services. What does that mean? It means that you are getting more focused with your marketing and catering specifically to your target market. You're not wasting dollars and time marketing to people that don't care.
4. Get Found by Those Looking for YOU
We've touched on this a bit earlier, but it's worth hammering home. Let's take a look at investing in a billboard. You'll get numbers like the DEC (daily effective circulation) - the estimated number of people that could potentially see your ad in any given 12 or 18 hour span. Well...so what? If I have a DEC of 23,000, but only 1,000 of those are my target market (persona) then I'm essentially paying for an estimated 22,000 people to see my ad that will never act. With inbound marketing services, we're looking at optimizing your content on your website, landing pages, content offers, social networks, email blasts, blog posts, and SEO to only attract those that are actually looking for you and interested in what you have to say. Getting found online is the key. Just to go back to our previous example, of those 1,000 that are your target market, how many are going to remember to act later? How many actually noticed the billboard? With inbound marketing, you're serving up content that people are looking for immediately.
5. React, Reposition, Refocus
Through inbound marketing services, an inbound marketing agency is able to understand what is working, what is not, and where the breakdown is happening. Are you having success driving clicks on your call-to-action, but have a low conversion rate from that CTA? Maybe your landing page needs to be tweeked. People not responding to your Tweets? Maybe you're not providing the right kind of content to that audience. Maybe that isn't even the right audience for you. Not getting views on your blog posts? Maybe your keywords need to be edited. Maybe you need to optimize more of your content around those keywords to increase your ranking. See through inbound marketing, we have the ability to spot trends and act on them quickly.
With an outbound campaign, you typically don't know if something is working or not until after you've spent your budget and people either buy or don't. How many of us have sent out a direct mail piece to thousands of homes or offices just to have two returned? It obviously didn't work, but you didn't know that until after the campaign was run and paid for. It was just wasted money.
Back to the promise, excitement, and goals of 2016. How do you best see your business accomplishing those goals? What is it going to take to accomplish them? What are the consequences if you don't accomplish them? Take some time to give them some thought and honestly answer these questions. Really give them some thought.
Inbound marketing is not for every business. Some businesses are still extremely successful with direct mail, billboards, television and radio commercials, and even print ads.
If you think your business may benefit from inbound marketing services or have questions about how it works, let's chat!
