Traditional marketing consists of trade shows, marketing communications, television advertisements, print campaigns, telemarketing and direct mail campaigns which utilize purchased lists to target specific customer demographics. Traditional marketing is still effective for many businesses. But if traditional marketing is the only form of marketing utilized by a business, a business can be missing out on a powerful and growing form of marketing, inbound marketing.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing utilizes techniques in which customers find a business on their own. Businesses can improve their chances of being found by publishing relevant content on their web site, blog or by utilizing social networking sites. Traditional marketing utilizes techniques which typically interrupt customers either through commercials, print ads or telemarketing. Inbound marketing is permission based and often sought out by customers through information searches and networking online.
As recently revealed in the American Marketing Association webinar “How to Use Social Media for Lead Generation” presented by Rick Burnes, Inbound Marketing Manager for Hubspot, a key component of inbound marketing is social media. Social media allows business owners and entrepreneurs to network online. Social networking helps individuals meet people, build relationships, ask and answer questions and build trust among customers.
As a critical component of inbound marketing, social media can help a business with search engine optimization while promoting a blog, web site and generating new leads for their business.
What Components Make Inbound Marketing Work?
A key element of inbound marketing is providing useful content to potential customers. Business should focus on providing content that solves problems, answers questions or provides information that their customers may be searching for.
Businesses can enhance their lead generation by publishing useful information to a blog, podcasts, eBooks, news release and videos. Burnes cautions businesses using inbound marketing to keep the content published relevant to what customers want to read and avoid publishing content that is too promotional in nature.
Business owners should utilize a variety of social media sites to link relevant information and customers together. For instance, a business can promote an article featured on their blog through conversations had on Twitter, Facebook or other social networking sites.
Other simple inbound marketing techniques for a business to follow may be to include a call to action and link to a blog or web site for every outgoing e-mail, Twitter comment or Facebook posting. These links can help drive more traffic and generate new leads for a business.
With inbound marketing, small businesses can compete with limited budgets by providing compelling content, building online relationships, adding value to social networking groups and forums and positioning their business as a valuable resource for customers to turn to.
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