Inbound Marketing is term that is relatively new to the advertising world. Though companies like Hubspot have been around since 2006, there were only 14,000 attendees at last year’s Inbound conference. 14,000 doesn’t seem like a small number, but it really is when you compare it to the larger marketing workforce. That being said, the previous year’s conference had around 10,000, so if you do the math, that’s an increase of over 70%! People are catching onto Inbound Marketing and believe me; you want to be ahead of the curve, not behind it.
So what is Inbound Marketing? It is a great way to get content in front of the right potential customers that are specifically in need of your company’s services and turn them into brand advocates. In order to execute that sort of strategy effectively, you need a lot of time. Inbound Marketing is not for the faint of heart. It needs to be worked on regularly. New and interesting content needs to be generated consistently and systems need to be put in place to nurture future clients. Personally, I think it is the time investment that scares people away from this type of marketing strategy, but there’s no need to fear the change. This sort of system can be integrated easily into your budget and over time will help to build your brand much more successfully than by using transactional ads alone.
Not convinced? Want to stick with traditional marketing alone? Consider these notes from Mashable:
- 44% of direct mail doesn’t get opened
- 86% of people fast forward or skip through TV commercials
- 84% of the 24-34 year old market leaves a website because they consider ads to be unrelated to them or pushy in general
- The overall cost for outbound is just more than inbound marketing
So why is Inbound Marketing more effective than Outbound Marketing? It’s really because it is interactive and the audience wants to engage with it. Our job as Inbound Marketers is to provide something helpful to your audience so that they feel educated, valued and respected. Typical Outbound Marketing is not concerned with education; instead it is made up of one-way advertising that aggressively seeks an audience that may not be interested. In the digital age, consumers of all kinds are more informed about your product than in past years, so pushing out what they already know from their own research is not going to generate the sort of response it has in the past. The bottom line is that new marketing needs to provide value in order for you to receive a favorable and relevant response.
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