Understanding Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing attracts parties with specific interests to what you offer to you through a series of pull marketing techniques. It draws potential customers who are in the midst of proactively seeking for solutions to connect with the right fit of providers and sellers. Inbound marketing is a lot more complex than traditional marketing as it considers and relates to the needs of its audience in the creation of any content and builds in sophisticated qualifiers and filters in promotional efforts.  Effective inbound marketing relies primarily on how much you understand the needs of your customers to create compelling content and employs digital marketing techniques to move them along the buying cycle and culminate in their preference to purchase from you.

Types of inbound marketing

Marketing techniques that brings potential customers to you through the use of customized content are classified as inbound marketing. Some of the most common types of inbound marketing include:

1. Search Engine Optimization

Meticulous selection and application of keywords on your website to optimize and increase its ranking on search engine sites. Highly optimized keywords and key phrases usually have high volume of proactive searches; this means that they will result in more traffic and also bring more potential buyers to your website.

2. Search Marketing

Paid keywords through pay-per-click, available on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing or social media sites like LinkedIn and Facebook.

3. Content Marketing

Sharing current and relevant information on your website through a variety of ways such as blogs, web pages, white papers, reports, studies, statistics, trends, and videos. Another form of content marketing can also be through thought leadership when one gets invited as a guest speaker at trade conferences. For content marketing to be effective, businesses need develop a content promotion plan mapping out how best to get the attention of proactive buyers.

4. Social Media Marketing

Social publishing makes use of the large social media giants in the market, and they can reach more audience with like-minded interests through personal and affiliated networks.

Running an Effective Inbound Marketing Campaign

Statistics indicate that inbound marketing has grown rapidly:

• Gartner: properly executed Inbound Marketing tactics are 10 times more effective for lead conversion compared to outbound methods.
• Hubspot: Inbound practices produce 54% more leads than traditional outbound practices.
• Mashable: Inbound marketing costs 62 percent less per lead than traditional outbound marketing
• Hubspot: The number of marketers who state they are practicing inbound rose from 60% in 2014 to 85% in 2015, while the percentage of marketers who concede they don’t run inbound was nearly halved to 13%

Success with inbound marketing is today key to the success of many companies in many industries, and it is more than just execution. Careful and meticulous planning and strategy, combined with competitor analysis and comparison is required to generate positive returns on investment. Many a times, companies do not value the efforts paid to this, and end up executing ineffective and money consuming projects without result.