Sales teams and company owners need to change their advertising habits to really match with how people consume information today when making a purchasing decision. Traditional marketing is progressively becoming less and less effective. Inbound marketing strategies are shining a new light that is perfect for attracting customers of the future.
So what’s the best alternative for small company owners and sales people? The answer is the inbound methodology which we’ll be discussing today. It’s one form of marketing where you don’t chase prospects, they chase you.
How? By concentrating all of your efforts on search engine optimisation, content and social media. Doing the above isn’t just very inexpensive, which is always a bonus these days, but is additionally very targeted too. You’ll receive prospects that are actively searching for your goods and services instead of individuals or tire kickers who have no interest in what you’re selling.
Bringing Traffic to Your Site
A key step in any inbound marketing strategy is to bring in traffic in the hopes of converting these visitors into customers for your brand. By combining SEO and content marketing together we can start to drum up traffic through creating content and phrasing our brand around optimised keywords which are being used by potential leads who will be prime for conversion.
Inbound Marketing Strategies are a Passive Form of Marketing
Inbound marketing strategies have the unique bonus of being quite a low-key form of advertising. What I meant by this is that unlike other forms of advertising, your audience isn’t immediately aware that you’re trying to sell them something like they would with a billboard or a television ad. Instead, with the inbound methodology, your main goal is to actually provide genuinely helpful content that assists your prospects in making a purchasing decision.
Data Driven Marketing
Inbound marketing services works off the foundation of creating content based on an existing demand for a product or service. By using this existing demand, we end up finding keywords that a prospect would use when they are interested in the product or service provided. This means we’re working with direct data that informs exactly what content we produce, the tone, and how to perform outreach. Every step of the process is informed by detailed research and strategy development.
High-Quality and Qualified Leads
As we spoke about earlier, since we’re specifically targeting people actively on the radar for your product or service, we’ll be dealing with leads of a much higher quality. Instead of blasting our message out to the world and hoping that the certain demographic we’re targeting is consuming the communication effectively we’re able to speak directly to this high-quality audience and keep the conversation going until they are ready to be converted.
Becoming an Industry Expert
Depending on your industry, the chances are a lot of your competitors have not been implementing inbound marketing strategies. This leaves an attractive amount of potential customers on the table for the taking. Not only that, but it also leaves a space open for you to be known as an expert in your industry, a thought leader, which increases the trust factor of your brand.
The inbound methodology allows us to attain this by providing these amazing resources (for free), using this gravitational pull to get customers and also boost credibility as a brand. If you think about yourself as a consumer, it’s likely that if you had a choice between Company A that provides a service and Company B that provides the same service and has also published countless numbers of articles that verifies their expertise in the field – you’d go with Company B.
The Campaign Never Ends
A huge plus for inbound marketing comes with the realisation that once your content is produced, it continues working for you to get leads forever. Whilst other forms of advertising may have a clear end date for when a campaign is finished and no longer communicates to your audience, inbound takes the cake as once it’s live on your site it’ll continue to pull in traffic associated with those optimised keywords.
Building Long Lasting Relationships
Building long relationships with your customers by providing them with useful content is not a new concept. For example, the Michelin Guide – published by Michelin Tyres, was created over 100 years ago to encourage people to drive more and explore by giving them useful car and motorcycle advise as well as reviewing hotels and restaurants which is where the Michelin Star now comes from.
Providing great content to your customers shouldn’t just end once they’ve purchased a product. It should live through a full life cycle and still provide use to them even after they’re a customer. This increases your credibility and builds long term relationships. As we know in sales, it’s cheaper and more lucrative to retain existing customers than it is to attract new ones – so make it count!
Conclusion
We hope you’ve come out of this article understanding why inbound marketing strategies are the way forward in advertising your business to your most ideal customers. The inbound methodology is a genuine one, focussed on putting the customers needs before the business which cultivates a great community in the process.
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