When you think of marketing, what’s the first thought that comes to mind? Well, you might think of the costs associated with advertising on print, radio, TV and or online. You might immediately think of the costs of email marketing, or the costs of market based research. Or, your immediate thought might be geared towards how a company finds customers. In this sense, the company may use these aforementioned marketing approaches to search for its customers. These are known as outbound marketing approaches and require a substantial amount of capital to make them work. However, what if customers were to search for your business online? Wouldn’t it be great if instead of searching for them, they found you? Well, inbound marketing is what makes this possible.
What is Inbound Marketing?
In its simplest form, inbound marketing is a cost effective method of allowing the company to be searched, rather than to search. Better put, instead of looking for customers, your customers look for you. In fact, you’re currently reading an example of inbound marketing on this blog. This blog is an example of inbound marketing, and while I don’t exactly own a company, everyday this blog brings in people looking for information based on my professional experience.
The point is that having a blog or web-site isn’t just meant to have an online presence, it’s actually a form of inbound marketing that is far more cost effective, and some argue a more successful form of marketing, than traditional outbound marketing – such as those previously mentioned adds, trade shows, print, radio and TV advertising.
The above video explains inbound versus outbound marketing and is from the post: Sample Marketing Budget Excel Sheet: Graph & Pie-Chart of Expenditures
What are the Benefits of Inbound Marketing?
If you’re concerned about the cost of inbound marketing, don’t be! The costs of inbound marketing are a fraction of the costs of outbound marketing. The only real significant cost is the time it takes to write valuable and important content. Most blogging platforms are easy to use and incredibly inexpensive. Other than the cost of web-hosting, your expenditures on this type of marketing are minimal at best. Here is a complete list of the benefits of inbound marketing approaches – such as running a blog.
- Inexpensive
- High marketing ROI (return on investment)
- Ease of tracking on incoming traffic
- Source of information on best business practices
- Solid platform to express ideas, approaches and core competencies
What are the Keys to Inbound Marketing Success?
To improve inbound marketing approaches, some companies may choose to combine it with some outbound marketing strategies. For instance, advertising your company’s blog or web-site online is one method of increasing the traffic to your blog. Some may choose to make their blog or web-site more visible by ensuring the blog is advertised at trade shows and conferences. Some may choose to use the services of SEO (search engine optimization) company whose main focus is to use the keywords relevant to your company’s business, in order to drive traffic to your site. These keywords are those words people use to search for information on the internet. SEO companies are well versed in ensuring your keywords have increased visibility. Still, others choose to simply avoid these costs and promote their blogs and web-sites via online forums, social networks like Facebook & Twitter, or even submit their blog’s content to blog catalog’s – which are merely a platform for multiple blogs to get content out into the internet.
If you decide to run a blog, make sure to have an easy to use platform. Again, the costs of inbound marketing are merely a fraction of the cost of conventional marketing approaches, so you may just find the need to combine some of those aforementioned outbound marketing approaches to drive traffic to your site or blog.
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