What’s the Urgency Around Inbound Marketing?
As a business owner, you probably understand the importance of marketing and sales. However, what may be a bit unclear is how inbound marketing (commonly referred to as digital marketing, internet marketing, and online marketing) can grow your business, and why it may be a better solution than traditional marketing.
Inbound marketing is the process of drawing the attention of leads to your expertise as a business. It’s achieved through pushing out valuable content through your online channels such as your blog and social platforms. This helps to promote your thought leadership, helpfulness, and reliability as a business.
3 Reasons Why Digital Marketing Outperforms Traditional Marketing Strategies
It’s important to consider the benefits of both inbound marketing strategies and traditional marketing strategies when choosing an appropriate strategy for your company.
When weighing the pros and cons, here are a few facts to consider:
- Traditional marketing strategies advertise or “push” a business’s products and services on the consumer, even if they are not actively seeking that product or service. This may turn off your consumer. Inbound (or digital) marketing, on the other hand, focuses on putting the right structures in place that allow customers to find you when they are in need of your product or service.
- Traditional marketing tactics such as television ads, print ads, direct mail pieces, etc. can become very difficult – if not impossible – to track. When was the last time you could prove real ROI from a print ad? Inbound marketing uses a number of different strategies that increase your likelihood of being found online by your prospective customers, such as creating relevant content, utilizing search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, and engaging on social media. With the right systems and processes in place, you can track each of these strategies, measure the number of qualified leads they are bringing to your website, and determine whether or not that lead was eventually converted to a customer.
- Inbound marketing costs significantly less than an outbound marketing strategy. A standard outbound marketing campaign can easily cost thousands of dollars to execute, while inbound marketing strategies has proven to cost 61% less per lead.
Why Your Business Can’t Afford Not to Utilize Inbound Marketing Strategies
As an owner of a business, you are probably heavily focused on numbers. You want data to prove the effectiveness of any given strategy you implement. It’s important for you to know at the end of the day whether or not the dollars you spent delivered the leads you were expecting.
The awesome thing about inbound marketing is that it can provide some of the best analytics and marketing information out there. There is tangible data to measure: How many people visited our website this month? How many people clicked on our call-to-action? How many people left the site without responding to a call-to-action? What blog articles are pulling the most qualified leads? These are all metrics that can be easily tracked. And the answer to these questions will shape the direction of your digital marketing for the future so that you can make meaningful adjustments.
