The effectiveness of outbound marketing has been
declining drastically in recent years. Spam folders, caller ID, and the
intuition to ignore snail mail have made old school marketing methods useless.But when one road closes, another one opens.
Welcome to the new era of marketing: inbound. Inbound marketing is not an offensive tactic
like most people would initially think. Instead, when used effectively inbound
marketing actually creates stability for your company in the market without
giving your company the ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ type brand.
In short summary, inbound marketing is anything
that brings customers in. This is a completely opposite approach of traditional
marketing, which is focused on going out to get prospect’s attention. Examples of inbound marketing include e-books,
blogging, social media, infographics, and webinars. These forms of marketing
provide value to prospects first, and then the seller benefits later on after
the relationship is established.
When you start implementing inbound techniques,
here are some of the benefits you’ll start seeing.
1.
You’ll
save a lot of money from your marketing budget
Cash in the bank is synonymous with how strong
the walls are for your fortress. Once your money runs out, competitors will
breakthrough and you’ll be in deep trouble.
Inbound marketing is a much cheaper option than
outbound. It takes a good writer, and some industry knowledge to start building
your inbound content. Compare this with a cold call team, printed materials,
and wasted email campaigns sent to people who could care less about your
company.
Inbound practices save you a ton of money, while
making sure you get a maximum return on the dollars you put to play.
2.
You’ll
build assets for your business
The number of cold calls someone makes is not an
asset. Either are the amounts of letters you send, or the number of spam
folders your email reaches.
On the other hand, inbound marketing provides a
ton of assets that makes your company protected from new entrants. A perfect
example is your ranking on Google. How do you get the top spots on Google
search? You get a ton of links and push an enormous amount of content.
Companies like HubSpot and Zappos have perfected this methodology, making them
a very hard target for new companies to go after.
All the content you push is an asset for your
business. The engaged following you have on social media and all the websites
pointing to your company are assets as well. The more you inbound the stronger
these assets become and the safer your company is.
3.
You’ll
build a lasting brand
Outbound marketing is an
effective way to get customers to absolutely hate you. Can you name a time
where you actually looked forward to being cold called? Never. And what’s your
feeling towards the company that cold called you? Probably not the ideal one
right? Now compare that emotion with the one you get after you read an article
or watch a video that provides valuable content that you enjoy. It ignites a
completely different feeling. Instead of running away from the company, we run
towards it. Would you rather have a company that customers avoid at all cost,
or a company that prospects go out of their way to engage with?
The choice is yours.
Source: forbes.com
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