« Inbound Marketing Basics: Building Blocks for Success »

Inbound marketing is a relatively new marketing methodology. It can scare and confound even the most experienced marketing professionals. But it does not have to. You just need to understand the basics and then it not only makes sense, it actually seems a better and smarter approach.

Inbound Defined

Inbound is internet-based marketing. It works by having prospects find you, rather than the traditional marketing approach of going out and finding prospects through such methods as direct mail and direct response advertising.

Building a Solid Inbound Marketing Strategy

PUBLISH. Content is king in the inbound marketing world. Marketing endeavors should focus on delivering information that is relevant and useful to your target audience. For example, if you run a nursing home business, you could create a white paper directed at the adult children of elderly parents on a universal subject, such as “The Effects of Aging on An Elderly Loved One.” Or, if you’re an insurance company, you could create an annual “Summary of Verdicts in Employment Practices Liability Litigation,” which would be directed at risk managers and business executives. The key when you publish content is to not overtly sell your own company or product. You want to provide information that prospects will value enough to download (in exchange for contact information).

PROMOTE. With inbound marketing you do not commercially print the content (i.e., white papers) and mail them blindly to addresses on a mailing list. Instead, you self-promote the content online. You do this for free through various social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.), the blogosphere and email.

OPTIMIZE. The content you create as well as the text you use online to promote your content should all be optimized with keywords that are most relevant to your target audience. This optimization will enable your content and related online communications to be found by Google and other search engines. So, if someone does a Google search on the words “nursing homes Rochester NY,” your white paper on “The Effects of Aging” will pop up in the search results. THEY FOUND YOU! Cool, huh?

COMPEL. Once a potential client finds you, it is critical to greet them with a compelling online offer. This offer will most likely be to provide a free white paper, or a free analysis or some other high value offer. When the offer is compelling enough you will succeed in driving traffic to a landing page. The landing page is like the reply card in traditional marketing. It is the place where the individual takes an action that transforms him/her into an actual prospect. They do this by completing a simple contact form in exchange for the high value offer.

ANALYZE. Successful inbound marketers use a content management system (CMS) to analyze how their online marketing efforts are working. These systems show your online marketing ROI (a difficult number to capture through traditional marketing channels). A good CMS will also show you at a glance how many leads you are getting from specific content, what blog articles are most successful, which social media channels are actually delivering leads and much, much more. Inbound best practices encourage analyzing online marketing efforts daily. Then simply change what is not working and do more of what is working. 

What Do You Think?

When you look at the basic components of the inbound marketing methodology, it's not all that scary or confounding, right? Has your marketing team made the transition to inbound? If yes, have your inbound efforts been successful? What were your greatest challenges in making the transition? Please share your thoughts in the comments section. And, as always, thanks for reading.