In order to understand why your business should adopt an inbound marketing strategy, you first need to understand what it is and how it is different from what you’re doing now.
Traditional outbound marketing techniques do not work anymore.
- Television - People skip ads at all costs. With Netflix and DVRs, that has become increasingly easy to do.
- Radio – People are now listening more to satellite radio, Internet radio, and digital music players such as iPods and MP3 players. Terrestrial radio listeners are on the decline.
- Print Advertising - Yellow Pages, Newspapers - Let's be honest. When is the last time you actually picked up either?
- Outbound Calling – This tactic is extremely intrusive, and people go out of their way to avoid these types of advertisements with caller ID, do not call lists, and gatekeepers.
Inbound marketing is a philosophy based on providing potential customers with useful, remarkable content. While traditional outbound marketing is intrusive by nature, inbound marketing attracts and nurtures prospects through exceptional content, data, and customer service.
We at Blue Frog divide inbound marketing into 3 areas
- Be Attractive - Attract customers to your site through providing remarkable content, blogging, sound SEO strategy and social media.
- Be Engaging - Interact with your potential customers through calls to action, landing pages, and intelligent email marketing.
- Be Smart - Analyze your data and make changes accordingly to ensure you are optimizing your inbound marketing efforts.
When implementing an inbound marketing strategy, your website becomes the hub of your online marketing strategy and a major source of lead generation for your business.
Some eye-popping stats about inbound marketing:
- 93% of companies using inbound marketing increase lead generation.
- Inbound marketing is the #4 hottest marketing trend for 2013
- Inbound marketing leads cost 61% less than traditional outbound leads.
Top 10 reasons to adopt an Inbound Marketing Strategy
10) Receiving cold calls is annoying. When is the last time you received a call from someone trying to sell something and didn't immediately have a negative thought? You only get one chance to make a first impression. With a cold call, the chances of that first impression being positive are slim at best.
9) Inbound marketing leads are 62% less expensive than traditional outbound leads. Having a lower cost of customer aquisition can provide you with a tremendous advantage over your competition, whether through increased margins or greater flexibility when pricing your services.
8) You become a trusted advisor faster. The holy grail for any company is to become a trusted advisor to their customers. When you invest in the inbound marketing philosophy, you make a commitment to producing quality, customer-driven content. The sooner you establish yourself as a source of quality information, the sooner you achieve trusted advisor status.
7) Your website becomes more than just a billboard. We all have this incredible, relatively inexpensive opportunity to present our business to potential customers via the internet. However, very few companies take full advantage of this. Most websites are static and outdated at best. By utilizing inbound marketing and implementing strategies such as calls to action, landing pages, lead nurturing, SEO, and data analysis, you begin to separate yourself from the competition.
6) Social media suddenly has real meaning for your business. Everyone tells you how important it is for your business to use social media, but most people have no idea how to use it effectively. The reason social media works in our personal lives is that the content is interesting. People spend time on Facebook and Pinterest because there is engaging content. It works the same way for business. In order to attract attention through social media, you must create extraordinary content, which is the foundation of the inbound marketing philosophy.
5) Sales people leave, your website doesn't. It's no secret that hiring and training quality sales reps is challenging. A bad hire can set a company back thousands of dollars. A good sales rep leaving to the competition can be equally or even more damaging. Because of this, investing in sales people comes with a certain amount of risk. On the other hand, an investment in a good website is safe money. A website won't leave, nor will someone lure it away to represent their business.
4) Google is the primary source for information, and inbound marketing helps get you found. If we want information, we "Google" it. Google, of course, is a company, but the word has also become a verb, meaning to use an internet search engine, particularly google.com. No one says, I'm going to "Yahoo" this, or I'm going to "Bing" it. Google has become part of our daily lives, and learning how to rank on the first page of Google is becoming more and more critical to the success of a business. First page Google ranking is another key concept of the inbound marketing strategy.
3) Traditional advertising methods are costly and ineffective. Television? DVRs, Hulu, and Netflix have significantly diminished the effectiveness of this type of advertising. Radio? Again, significantly less effective due to Pandora, Sirius, and the ability to carry thousands of commercial-free songs on a smartphone. Print advertising? When is the last time you actually read a newspaper? These forms of advertising are on the decline. Underestimating or flat-out ignoring the fact that the internet is where people now go to find information could be a critical mistake for your business.
2) Implementing an inbound marketing philosophy can finally provide your business with a well-rounded marketing strategy. Many businesses market one-dimensionally and never fully close the loop. Correctly implementing an inbound marketing strategy can help strangers become site visitors, site visitors become leads, and leads become customers. Provide quality service for your customers, and they become promoters of your business. That is a winning strategy!
The #1 reason for implementing an inbound marketing strategy today: Your competitors are already considering inbound marketing! Inbound marketing is one of the hottest marketing trends for 2013. If you don't start now, you are giving your competitors a huge head start creating quality content for your potential customers. There are only 10 spots on the front page of Google. Getting too far behind makes the task of reaching this goal SIGNIFICANTLY more difficult.
We firmly believe that while search engine technologies are a huge part of our daily lives today, they will become increasingly important in the future. Customers will ask for information, and where they receive it will depend on who is doing the best job creating quality, useful content.
If you want to know more about inbound marketing, check out our website. We'd be happy to set up a free consultation to discuss what this powerful strategy can do for you!
