Things You Need To Know About Inbound Marketing
Hubspot coined this absolutely great approach towards managing and re-imagining the way your organization does marketing and builds relationships with customers which is getting noticed by large organizations.
But…first, if you haven't heard about inbound marketing yet, read from the experts below:
“Essentially, inbound marketing is attracting people who are interested in your product or service by helping them solve a problem. Why waste resources bombarding people who don’t need your solution with advertisements? By providing valuable information to consumers at the right time in their buyer’s journey, you’re helping people solve their problem using your solution — at a fraction of the cost” -Hubspot
With inbound marketing practices, you not only make your marketing approaches extremely well but you also make them more efficient and effective than others and not to mention differently.
So now you see why it is important, so let's get a few things clear about inbound:
Inbound Is A Customer-Centric Approach:
In a world where there is a common belief amongst people which tells them “that in order to do business well you have to be ruthless and rob your customers” inbound plays its role to prove them wrong.
Inbound practices are more about providing value to customers while doing business well.
According to HubSpot “93% of consumers said they are more likely to be repeat customers at companies with remarkable service”.
A better approach towards creating a better win-win situation.
Inbound Is Not A Fad:
Surely you may see a thousand of strategies and approaches to marketing every day and decide to avoid the majority of them to save the hassle because most of them are not in the long run but Inbound won't be one of them.
Inbound marketing revolves around a simple philosophy of helping your customers and delighting them after they have purchased something from you!
And the concept of inbound has been around for ages as quoted by HubSpot:
“Think of the core strategy of inbound marketing: provide value and utility to your prospects, make yourself visible, earn trust, and earn the sale. Does that sound like a form of marketing that has withstood the test of time?”
Providing value while making a sale is not a new concept, it is just been more organized in this method.
Inbound vs Outbound:
Just to give you a quick idea of Outbound, it is the traditional marketing you see every day like:
Cold-calling, shouting in seminars, pitching in the wrong places with wrong products, interrupting you with social media content you can’t even relate to, trade shows, tons of marketing emails in your inbox, which sometimes annoys you so much that you start having second thoughts about the brands and might not even do business with them again!
One may argue that it works but even though it is costly the ROI is much less!
For example, consider you run a Cosmetics business:
Now you can try the outbound marketing approach which means you can try going door to door as a salesman or cold emailing to see if the customers are interested and then later sell them.
Or
You can try inbound marketing which involves creating a strategy that will create content on social media with great tactics to create brand awareness so that interested customers can know more about your product and services on your website and then show interest and purchase your products.
Attracting your real customers > Pitching everyone over and over and everywhere
The thing about inbound would be that instead of annoying your customers and begging them to buy your products you would create a simple plan to attract leads on your site to know more about your business and turn them into customers and build a better relationship.
It Does Not Solve Every Problem Your Business Ever Had:
Yes, Inbound comes with great packages towards providing great values with better customer relationships but it can’t solve every problem your business ever had.
It is necessary to address this as some people might think that applying Inbound Marketing is all they need in the organizations.
Inbound can help you to make better decisions on spending for ads, creating a better campaign, align your marketing goals with organizational goals, creating great content on social media, etc.
And some organizations might only have problems like this but that doesn't mean your entire energy should be invested in Inbound as, after all, it is marketing.
More resources for you to explore more:
Also, you can listen to Gary Vee on Inbound
Conclusion:
Inbound Marketing was created to make the marketing approach more human, authentic, and useful! Also, you avoid being spam and lose your valuable leads/customers. I think when you are a marketer, not all approaches will produce the desired result and often times you will scratch your head around that why you even bothered to try this, but that is what will tell you about things that worked well and things that didn't work so that you can focus on great ones and decide for yourself! This is one of them.
Thanks for reading!
Let me know what you think!
