In the last 10 years marketing has been undergoing a paradigm shift from buying attention to earning attention. Where does your company sit with marketing – do you mostly keep to traditional methods such as advertising, trade shows and sponsorship. Or, have you honed into the new holistic method of marketing with a digital base where you answer the questions your customers want to know through permission based educational content?
Inbound marketing is based on the premise that you are easy to find, that you pull customers to you. The theory is that you create content that interests your customers so they naturally gravitate to your business, which creates leads for you to close.
Marketers also have fallen in love with a well thought out inbound strategy because everything is measureable and the conversions speak for themselves. Unlike traditional marketing where you track sales in the hope that it was the ad you placed in the paper creating the blip – you don’t really know.
Because inbound is reliant on the digital world, each step of the process can be tracked and measured. You will know how your leads found you, showing you how they prefer to get their information. You will know where they went on your website, what pages they spent the majority of their time on and where they left.
With permission-based marketing you may be narrowing your potential audience, but what you narrow it to is the people who are really interested in what you are selling. The lead conversion of inbound marketing is much stronger than that of traditional channels. In fact, Vital claim that inbound marketing converts at a 750 per cent higher rate that traditional marketing.
Why does inbound marketing have such a strong conversion rate? It could have something to with the targeted information that is specific and useful. Rather than fighting for attention with a slash-all sale approach with all the other businesses, inbound creates information that can be read at a customer’s convenience and then it is designed to educate and engage – to answer a question, to help them with their business. It begins a conversation where the customer is respected and valued.
The tools that inbound marketers use at strategic points of the customer life cycle include blogs, keywords, social publishing, forms, calls-to-action, landing pages, CRM, surveys, smart content and social monitoring.
Your business may not need all these tools and you most likely won’t need them all at once – it will be dependent on individual customers and at what stage you are at with them. For example if you’re attracting new business you will be using keywords and blogs, if you’re talking to long-term customers you maybe using surveys to see what they like and how you can improve. Talk to us about how we can make inbound marketing work for you.
Inbound marketing is based on the premise that you are easy to find, that you pull customers to you. The theory is that you create content that interests your customers so they naturally gravitate to your business, which creates leads for you to close.
Marketers also have fallen in love with a well thought out inbound strategy because everything is measureable and the conversions speak for themselves. Unlike traditional marketing where you track sales in the hope that it was the ad you placed in the paper creating the blip – you don’t really know.
Because inbound is reliant on the digital world, each step of the process can be tracked and measured. You will know how your leads found you, showing you how they prefer to get their information. You will know where they went on your website, what pages they spent the majority of their time on and where they left.
With permission-based marketing you may be narrowing your potential audience, but what you narrow it to is the people who are really interested in what you are selling. The lead conversion of inbound marketing is much stronger than that of traditional channels. In fact, Vital claim that inbound marketing converts at a 750 per cent higher rate that traditional marketing.
Why does inbound marketing have such a strong conversion rate? It could have something to with the targeted information that is specific and useful. Rather than fighting for attention with a slash-all sale approach with all the other businesses, inbound creates information that can be read at a customer’s convenience and then it is designed to educate and engage – to answer a question, to help them with their business. It begins a conversation where the customer is respected and valued.
The tools that inbound marketers use at strategic points of the customer life cycle include blogs, keywords, social publishing, forms, calls-to-action, landing pages, CRM, surveys, smart content and social monitoring.
Your business may not need all these tools and you most likely won’t need them all at once – it will be dependent on individual customers and at what stage you are at with them. For example if you’re attracting new business you will be using keywords and blogs, if you’re talking to long-term customers you maybe using surveys to see what they like and how you can improve. Talk to us about how we can make inbound marketing work for you.
By Margot Bawden
