Being bombarded with emails you haven’t subscribed to? Tired of listing emails as spam? Getting random cold calls from businesses you have no reason to associate with? Isn’t it true that no one enjoys being interrupted! This is precisely why companies and organizations are turning to Inbound Marketing.
Inbound marketing encompasses all marketing methods that enable you to target a specific demographic in need of your product or service based on your buyer persona, rather than reaching out to a large number of people who may or may not be interested in your product or service. Instead of thrusting a product in the faces of your clients, Inbound Marketing puts focus on generating excellent content that answers their concerns and solves their problems. The idea is to ensure that every time your customer recognizes a need, they think about you.
According to HubSpot, “the inbound methodology is the method of growing your organization by building meaningful, lasting relationships with consumers, prospects, and customers. It’s about valuing and empowering these people to reach their goals at any stage in their journey with you.” The primary purpose of employing an Inbound Marketing Strategy is to direct people to your organization rather than chasing them down with non-targeted outbound marketing sources such as commercials, phone calls, and billboards. Techniques such as Search Engine Optimization(SEO), Content Marketing, Blogging, and Social Media Marketing have gained enormous traction as more attention is devoted to Inbound Marketing sources. While the results of the Inbound Marketing activities may not be as noticeable and direct as those of the outbound efforts, they are far more critical to your firm in the long run to develop a trustworthy brand image and a loyal client base.
Here are 8 benefits of Inbound Marketing that you should examine right now to breathe new life into your organization:
- Cost-Effectiveness:
Since cost-cutting is a top concern for all businesses alike, it’s imperative to ensure that the return on investment (ROI) on your Marketing efforts is maximized. Mass marketing with Billboards, TV advertisements, Print Ads, Tele-Marketing is often a massive expenditure with little or no certainty of conversions. According to HubSpot, “Inbound Marketing costs 62% less per lead than traditional outbound processes.” It is no surprise that Inbound Marketing is less expensive because there is no need to disrupt a customer’s activities to capture their attention.
- Lead Generation:
According to Insider, “a qualified lead is a potential customer in the future, based on certain fixed criteria of your business requirements.”
The distinction between a lead and a qualified lead makes Inbound Marketing more valuable than the traditional marketing channels. With Inbound Marketing, you may target a specific demographic based on the buyer personas that a company actively deals with.
With well-defined buyer profiles in mind, you can accurately target your content, ensuring that your traffic is already more likely to be a higher quality lead rather than a broad passive audience that may or may not be interested in your solutions. Even if all your prospects do not convert into actual buyers, the percentage of people likely to become leads is much higher for inbound content than traditional ads.
- Brand Credibility:
When it comes to business, brand image is everything. Let’s take an example, shall we? When we think of sports shoes, what is the first brand that pops in our head? 8 out of 10 people would say Nike! Have you ever wondered why this is so?
Brand image and buyer perception are crucial here. Businesses ensure that they are associated with a sense of credibility so that when a prospective customer has a need or an issue, yours is the first brand that comes to mind.
A good quality Inbound Marketing plan, such as excellent blogs, infographics, personalized emails, social proofs, guarantees that your customers directly link the same quality to your products/services. Not only can it help you spread the word and make your brand known, but indirectly this will generate more leads and sales in the future.
- Analytics Friendly:
Being measurable is one feature of Inbound Marketing that sets it apart from traditional marketing sources. Because measurable data is readily available in the case of inbound efforts, businesses can track the performance of each of their campaigns individually and verify that there are no gaps in the user journey. Analyzing data ensures that marketers can discover what is working for the business or brand and what is not, allowing them to make informed decisions at the right moment saving both money and time.
Making data-backed decisions is always a better idea than relying on hit and trial to measure the success of your marketing efforts. Tracking user journeys with quantitative data allows you to put yourself in the shoes of your target audience and assure a higher success rate for your marketing activities in terms of lead generation, conversions, and brand awareness.
- Personalized:
The ability of Inbound Marketing to be tailored based on specific buyer personas that a firm has in mind is arguably its most significant advantage.
Customizing the user experience on your website can be the first step in this direction. Businesses can utilize Analytics to identify user behavior in terms of demographics, age groupings, gender profiles, or time spent on the website. All of these factors can assist a marketer in tailoring an Inbound Marketing process for every lead and provide an appropriate Call to Action (CTA) for each user. Therefore, Inbound Marketing is unrivaled when it comes to interaction and engagement with potential clients.
- Long-Lasting:
When it comes to Inbound Marketing, your marketing and sales effort produces results not just for the present but also for the future. How? Let us take SEO as an example.
When you publish your content online and optimize it with the proper SEO strategies, your material will gradually but steadily rank higher on search engines like Google, ensuring that you attract enough traffic to your content and eventually impact sales. The ROI of your Inbound Marketing efforts often does not expire, making Inbound the right choice for both small and large businesses.
Businesses make a one-time investment in their inbound efforts and reap the benefits as long as the material is available. When using traditional marketing methods like print or television adverts, your leads stop displaying when your ad runs out.
- Dynamic usability:
Businesses nowadays are more diversified than ever before. Even though we can find large enterprises everywhere, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) dominate the corporate scene. While traditional forms of marketing, such as advertisements or billboards, can be costly for these SMBs, Inbound Marketing provides the benefit of marketing at a low cost.
- Relationship Marketing:
According to HubSpot, “Relationship marketing is a marketing strategy that cultivates deeper, more meaningful relationships with customers to ensure long-term satisfaction and brand loyalty. Relationship marketing is not focused on short-term wins or sales transactions — rather, it is focused on delighting customers for the long haul.”
This is precisely where Inbound Marketing outperforms the Outbound processes. Businesses develop an efficient two-way connection that extends beyond sales by delivering value to their customers rather than solely on sales presentations. In addition to establishing a relationship, inbound efforts aim to maintain it with both current and prospective clients. Firms must form alliances based on trust and credibility to compete with the sector’s fierce competition.
In this day and age where the customer is king, rather than developing a marketing strategy based on the concept of “one size fits all,” organizations should instead focus on a tailor-made marketing approach. With the benefits and practical outcomes that inbound processes provide, there is no doubt that marketers must focus on their Inbound Marketing efforts to secure the success of their company.
iQuasar is a Northern Virginia headquartered company that has been in business for more than 15 years. We are experienced in working with SMB customers, among others. We provide business process outsourcing and Information Technology services like Proposal Development, Recruitment, Web Development, and Managed IT services. iQuasar’s Web Presence as a Service (WPaaS) helps small businesses to build a professional presence on the web. We help small businesses to be current with the online marketing trends and continuously showcase their business’ services and products to the right audiences.
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