How to tell if you need to invest in inbound marketing

With inbound marketing, your customers find you. For over a decade now inbound marketing has been providing businesses with a way to build qualified prospects, trust and credibility by attracting customers to your brand, rather than chasing them. With a combination of focused content and genuinely relevant and helpful interactions, the strength of inbound marketing lies in earning the attention of clients or customers, as opposed to trying to buy it.

Does your business need inbound marketing?

The short answer is probably yes. Most businesses do need inbound marketing to find and establish those strong customer bonds and create loyalty. If you find your current marketing efforts don’t sit that well, don’t feel aligned with your brand or – crucially – don’t generate results, then you might be stuck in a cycle of outbound marketing. It’s simple to tell the difference between the two:

• Inbound marketing – messages that pull people towards your company, services or products so that it feels like a natural fit for the customer.
• Outbound marketing – marketing methods that push your products, services and company on to customers whether it’s a natural fit or not.

How does inbound marketing work?

Content is king in the inbound marketing world. However, it’s not sales content but content that has been designed to answer questions and tackle the needs that your prospects and customers might have. Inbound marketing content is personalised, tailored to the needs of customers as opposed to generic and general.

The more data you gather on leads as your inbound marketing progresses, the better personalisation can get. Inbound marketing content is delivered across the channels where your customers and leads already are i.e. where they want interactions to take place with brands. That could be social media, search or through blogging or other content marketing.

What happened to outbound marketing?

Most consumers have now wised up to the messages in a lot of outbound marketing and that has considerably lessened its impact. Because outbound marketing is often crudely done it can feel patronising and obvious. It can be highly effective as part of a strategy with inbound methods too but alone outbound marketing is no longer as effective as it used to be.

Why is inbound marketing effective?

Inbound marketing engages your audience and allows them to get to you by pursuing a genuine interest. This kind of lead is always going to be more valuable than one where there is no authentic connection with what you do or what you make. It means that your marketing efforts are relevant to your customers, as opposed to disrupting their train of thought or getting in the way of what they were doing – and it builds trust.

What can you achieve with inbound marketing?

The opportunities are unlimited, from driving traffic to your website, to growing a social media presence and increasing the likelihood of conversions. Inbound marketing methods generally boost revenue so it’s worth establishing some KPIs – such as reducing cost per lead or improving the site traffic to lead ratio conversion – so that you can monitor the progress that you make. Not only could you improve the ROI you see on marketing spend but the profile and reach of your entire business too.

The Iconic Digital team can help you plan and deliver effective inbound marketing for your business – with great results. Give us a call today on 020 7100 0726 to find out more.