Making the Most of Inbound Marketing
By Michael Cohn
Marketing, as an entity, has been around for a very long time. However, the approaches
to marketing have not changed but they have been enhanced by the addition of inbound marketing.
Inbound marketing, unlike traditional marketing, allows your clients and prospective clients
to come to you as opposed to you having to go after your clients and prospective clients in
traditional marketing.
People are clever
In the past, as a marketer, you would have spent a great deal of money on marketing your
brand. The payback for that was that your target audience actually paid attention to your marketing
materials. However, eventually, people became more sophisticated and found ways to block your
marketing efforts. If you bought ads in newspapers, magazines, etc., the other person could
simply not read it. If you bought ads on TV, they could change the channel. If you advertised
over the phone, the other person could just hang up.
Inbound marketing is a great new approach to marketing
Eventually, inbound marketing was born. Not only is inbound marketing a different approach
but it also allows you greater possibilities of succeeding because not only does your client
or prospect come to you but that person has chosen to do so willingly. That means that the
person is prequalified and he or she would be more than willing to connect with you. The challenges
that you always faced in the past when it came to marketing results are less challenging because
of inbound marketing. They get to decide if and when they go with you.
How does inbound marketing work?
As was stated previously, inbound marketing only works if the other person opts into
what you want them to do. At the very least, that will be basic contact information. In some
cases, it will be more than that. However, it is not as simple as the person becoming aware
of your existence online and then immediately deciding to connect with you and to cultivate
a relationship.
With inbound marketing, it takes time to build the relationship and to trust each other
and for your to become credible in the other person's eyes. It is important that you understand
that even though it may feel like a slow process to you, it is actually an extremely effective
process and will worth exploring. Inbound marketing works effectively for many different businesses.
The way that it works is that you consistently post top-quality, educational, valuable
content and the other person gets to know you and your business through your content. At some
point in the near future, that person will want to deepen the connection that he or she has
with you and you will begin to interact with each other. With any luck, you start to do that
regularly. Before you know it, you have built a solid, meaningful, mutually beneficial relationship
that will exist for a very long time.
At this point, you may be wondering how to get started using a strategy that includes inbound marketing.
• Establish your content marketing strategy: Content is king! That cannot
be emphasized enough. Before you do any writing at all, you need to establish your content
strategy. It is that strategy (or roadmap) that will keep your content flowing and will hopefully
help you to avoid any roadblocks in the way of your writing productivity. Your strategy should
contain detailed information about your target audience members, including their wants and
needs. Those details will guide you to customize your writing appropriately. Your first objective
is to solve the other person's problem(s). You need to write content that resonates with the
other person and that helps you to establish an emotional connection.
• Build your communities: Assuming that you have created a strong repository
of top-quality content, the next thing that you will need to ensure is that your online social
communities are in order. The reason for that is so that you have places to share your content.
Of course, that means that wherever you post your content, it will elicit positive results.
It is recommended that you choose quality over quantity when it comes to your online social
connections. However, you should still have a significant number of connections. You should
present your content in ways that appeal to your target audience, including words on relevant,
compelling topics, graphics, videos, etc.
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