In recent years, traditional marketing methods have grown more and more outdated and ineffective. Today, cold calls and blanket emails are being snubbed for what they are… cold and impersonal. Meaning it’s time to warm up. And what better way to do this than through the delightfully warm and personal world of inbound marketing; where the sun of popularity shines on businesses that educate, entertain and innovate, with profit and business growth necessarily following the light.
Your customer has changed and so should you
The methods by which we learn, research and acquire have undergone a drastic change in recent years, and the marketing landscape has had to adapt to keep up. Today, everyone and everything is online. And being online means you’re able to learn, integrate, analyse, and act like never before. With oceans of information at our fingertips, a random phone call from a random company pushing a random product now just seems quite, well… silly.
With 91% of people unsubscribing from emails, 24% of direct mail never being opened, and with TV ads and telesales growing increasingly irrelevant, knowing how and when to engage with leads requires insight that most businesses simply don’t have access to.
Whether we’re ready or not, marketing has already been disrupted
Across the board, people don’t buy what they don’t understand, and with most markets quickly growing saturated it’s increasingly difficult to make your business stand out amongst the pack.
Due to the lack of visibility across online activity, it’s extremely difficult to measure marketing ROI, and subsequently, your time and resource allocation can wander severely off course with budgets getting stretched across many (potentially unnecessary) channels.
The vastness of the online world has made the line between marketing and sales teams grow increasingly blurry, and pinning down precisely what their specific roles should be, and on which channels they should focus, is becoming an extremely hard thing to do.
So, what is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a time and cost efficient process of attracting and engaging customers through insightful and helpful content, this enables your business to cut through the noise and stand out in your field. Unlike outbound marketing, which disrupts, inbound marketing allows customers to find your business as they search online for solutions to their own specific problems.
The strength of this process is that it attracts engaged and qualified leads, meaning no time is wasted dealing with uninterested parties. Instead, your time is used to build and nurture relationships with the leads that count, resulting in a higher conversion rate, increased marketing ROI, larger profits and strong business growth.
Traditional Vs Inbound Marketing: Be relevant and helpful and your ideal customer will come to you
Now inefficient and ineffective, traditional marketing methods are out of tune with modern decision making. And this is where Inbound excels. It is integrated across all online channels to meet the needs of the costumer where they appear, offering the solutions they are there to find, and in a style that is adapted specifically to that area of interest and the type of person that is looking.
Inbound is not only effective from a business perspective, but when done right, it appears as nothing more than a friend helping a friend, a completely un-interruptive process of being there for someone who both needs and wants your help, and most importantly, who will thank you for it later.
In order to attract customers, we must give them something they love
As customer behaviours change in reaction to the growth of the online world, marketing and sales teams need to adapt. The most productive way to do this is to establish a system wherein your marketing and sales teams work closely together, sharing the same goals and feeding back insights that will help drive the overall growth of your business.
Bringing together the previously isolated insight and skills of sales and marketing teams is a key component of the inbound marketing methodology. Creating a system wherein leads are marked in terms of their engagement and interest with your business, allows for the right approach to the right people. The results of this can be huge, as leads are only approached by sales when they are ready to be sold to, otherwise, they remain in the hands of the marketing team where they can be nurtured until they are ready to be passed on.
Still asking yourself… why inbound?
If you’re still wondering why and how inbound marketing could work for you, here are some of the key benefits that might help you decide if this is the best way forward for your business:
1) Build trust
Through great and insightful content, you can establish a stronger relationship with your potential and future costumers
2) Attract your ideal customers
By creating timely and relevant content you’ll attract the right kind of prospects putting yourself in a better position to win their business
3) Measurability of your marketing ROI
By tracking and measuring the trends and successes of your campaigns and the content you’re creating, you’ll be able to allocate time and resources efficiently and effectively
4) Business growth
By generating better quality leads you will increase sales and grow your business
5) Happy customers
With no pushy sales in sight, and enjoying a service offering that goes above and beyond expectations, your costumers will be happy from their first interaction to their last!
When put into practice, inbound marketing is a great way to transform and modernise your business with stats showing that it can generate 67% more leads per month in comparison to traditional methodologies. If you’re looking to hit the ground running, partnering with a HubSpot affiliated inbound marketing agency can be a quick and effective way to get the guidance you need to understand and implement the methodology, both maximising your company’s efficiency and allowing it to surface amongst the masses in the online ocean.