If you’ve been dragging your heels on implementing a robust, inbound marketing strategy, now’s the time to reevaluate your options.
Whereas traditional marketing has you actively seeking out the attention of buyers, inbound marketing has your target audience coming straight to you.
So instead of sending out product brochures that get thrown in the trash or cold calls that go unanswered, you’ll have interested parties searching for answers and finding you in the process. Sounds like a better option, right? Let’s take a look at the true value of inbound marketing:
It’s affordable.
Compared to traditional marketing methods, an inbound strategy is considerably cheaper. Sure, you can still opt for ad space in relevant publications, but your main objective is to publish engaging content online (often for free), that encourages visitors to bring themselves through the sales pipeline. If you’re doing it all yourself, writing content, optimizing pages for SEO, and creating a social media presence are all part of the inbound strategy that doesn’t cost you anything other than time.
You can attract the right customer.
Because you’re getting visitors via content rather than ads, you have better control over who is being reached. Ideally, your content is targeted to your main buyer personas, so they’ll be most likely to find and read it. This eliminates a lot of time spent going after the wrong customer who just happened to click an ad that popped up on their screen. Each sales lead you get from an inbound marketing strategy is there because they want the information and services you provide.
It’s easy to tweak.
As you create new campaigns, you’ll continue to learn from each one. Maybe your audience prefers case studies over e-Books. Maybe they’re more active on Twitter than Facebook. Maybe your joke about a flying monkey wrench was your best-received tweet of all time. Whatever the case, you can always adjust your strategy as you figure out what’s working and what’s not. Your only limitation is yourself.
You can grow.
Once you’ve invested some time in creating high quality content and developing a strategy around it, you’ll start to see some more traffic rolling in. It’ll probably be modest at first, as you experiment with new SEO techniques and branding, but eventually you’ll hit your groove and likely see a compounding effect. As you build up more of a following and establish yourself as an industry thought leader, even more people will flock to you for guidance. It’s all about building trust and creating a solid reputation.
Now that you understand the benefits of an inbound marketing strategy, learn how to start building campaigns and growing your business.