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 ebooks, 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. Neither 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 watched 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 whose prospects go out of their way to engage with?
The choice is yours.
