Inbound Marketing, and Why Your Business Needs to Do it

Trends in marketing strategy can sometimes seem to move at the speed of light. Just as you get on top of one, you’re already behind the next! It’s hard to keep up to date and even harder to find methods that work. It’s no secret generating leads is a difficult and expensive process. Just think how many cold calls, trade shows, radio ads, or newspapers your company has utilized only to see little to no results? More importantly, what is this costing you? Adopting an inbound marketing strategy will not only generate leads, but can cut down costs, resources, and time.

The term inbound marketing can be a little confusing like many of the other fly by night buzz words that you’ve heard over the years, but make no mistake. Not only is inbound marketing here to stay, but it’s also vital to the success of your business by both generating leads and saving you money. So what is it?

To understand what inbound marketing is, it’s good to start with a brief overview of what is considered to be “outbound marketing.” Outbound marketing refers to traditional methods of marketing in which you reach out to your intended audience. Examples of this can include buying advertising space, sending out newsletters, cold calling, brochures and telemarketing. These examples are all “outbound” and follow the proverbial casting of the line into the pond and waiting for a bite. While it’s not debatable many of these methods yield great results, you can’t deny that buying a TV spot or radio time is expensive.

Inbound marketing in turn, consists of building sales funnels that bring you leads in a more passive manner. This is often through the creation of content like blogs, videos, eBooks, and webinars to name a few examples. These forms of content are often paired with landing pages, and are appropriately syndicated to social networks to enhance the online community built around your service. Creating content that people want will drive users to a landing page setup to collect contact information, allowing the sales representative to passively monitor and follow-up on those users who have demonstrated an interest in a particular topic.

The goal of inbound marketing is to create valuable and relevant information that will cause readers to look to your company as a source of expertise. Inbound marketing is often passive, as sales are second to what is important – providing valuable information to build your community and credibility online. A user will often be driven to a landing page not because not because they explicitly want your service, but because they are interested in the subject of your service. This positions the inbound marketer as a reliable, credible source on the topic. You can see, Inbound Marketing is different from past forms of marketing where advertisers would do anything possible to sell their product, inbound marketing is focused on building a relationship with your customer rather than selling to them, to earning their business.

Inbound marketing can deliver great results by eliminating the pressure caused by overly aggressive sales representatives.

It’s important to remember how much things have changed over the last 20 years. Your business has adopted to the shifts in technology, doesn’t it make sense that your marketing strategies should follow? Implementing a inbound marketing strategy can bring your sales and marketing department into the information age.

AdLuge measures nearly all forms of inbound marketing, including paid placements like Google Ads and Facebook Ads, which can often serve as excellent traffic drivers to content offering pages. Talk to us today for a free trial, and let us help you get started on measuring strategies that work.