Do you know what Inbound Marketing is or why it’s necessary for businesses of all sizes? Chances are, you already have a few of the applications active and didn’t even know it!
First, let’s understand the family tree. While Inbound Marketing is still fairly new, it does have a traditional older brother… Outbound Marketing. This older form of marketing relates to traditional advertising areas such as; tv, radio, print advertisements, and cold-calls/emails. Typically all of these avenues are expensive, hard to track, and are not always effective. Now as expected, Inbound Marketing is a little younger, technology savvy, and is all online. If we were to give an official definition here is what we would say, Inbound Marketing refers to the online or digital strategy of attracting potential customers.
Here are ten areas that make up inbound marketing:
1. Search Engine Optimization: How is your website getting found online?
2. Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest…
3. Blogging: Create consistent engagement by posting content that your audience is interested in and is searching for!
4. Videos: Did you know that YouTube is one of the largest search engines! How many times did you watch that cute cat video, come on, how many times?
5. Webinars: Showcase your talents or skills to an audience and teach something.
6. Research/White Papers: Help your viewers further understand a topic or guide them to make a decision.
7. Email Marketing: Showcase latest news, offers, fun facts, or lead your subscribed clients to a recent blog post with stylized emails that attract attention and persuade.
8. Content Creation: Make sure the content (includes videos and photography) that you are blogging about, have on your website, or other online sources is relevant and current.
9. Landing/Registration Pages: Use this to showcase a special promotion, welcome message, or to gather a visitor’s information.
10. Events: Host a 5k run, a French cooking class, or gallery evening, again make sure that it’s relevant to your business or promotion.
The best thing about these ten areas is that many of them are free (only costing your time) or are fairly inexpensive to setup. It’s also ok to use just one of the applications mentioned but when multiple applications are used and interacting with each other… dynamic results can often take shape!
Businesses need to implement Inbound Marketing tactics to attract customers that have the potential to become customers.
In contrast to Outbound Marketing where it was tough to figure out where potential customers were at, with the popularity of technology, inbound marketing makes it easy to get to your customers quickly. What’s even better is that many times customers will rave about the services/products that are offered, which in return helps to promote your company (umm… free advertising).
One of the easiest ways to go about getting starting with Inbound Marketing is to to ask yourself, where are you at online and how would a customer find you? If you don’t have a website, that’s a very good place to start. The website should act as the headquarters for your inbound marketing campaign. Any web design company (contact us!) or web designer should not only be able to setup an easy to use website, but they should be able to also integrate a blog/newsfeed, videos, social media accounts, create great content, and help with your search engine optimization (SEO) rankings. Now do you see why the website alone is one of the biggest factors? Plus when using social media, a website is a great place to point your followers to in order to learn more or to contact you.
We’ve only focused on the broader details of inbound marketing but hope it will give you a good idea into this great marketing strategy.
Need help with your inbound marketing? Contact us to learn how we can help you get found online!
R2F Creative LLC provides graphic design + branding and web design solutions for clients nationwide and locally in Ankeny and Des Moines, Iowa.
