Inbound Marketing

If you’ve tried to figure out what your business should be doing online anytime within the past 2 years, you’ve no doubt run across the term, “Inbound Marketing”.

Simply put:

“Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy
that focuses on getting found by customers.”

Inbound marketing. (2011, July 31). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 11:29, August 26, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Inbound_marketing&oldid=442417459

Inbound marketing is the opposite of  the more traditional”Outbound Marketing” (or as it is pejoratively called, “Interruption Marketing”) where the goal is to go to where customers live and direct their attention to your products and services (think TV and magazine ads).

The goal of inbound marketing is to create a spot where potential and current customers can, and want to, find you and, once they have you can:

• Establish your expertise and authority around your products and services, and
• Expose them to information about your products and services.

The key to having customers want to find you is to provide value in some way and most often, this value takes the form of online content.

Online Content Marketing

The reason that online content is so popular is that it’s the quickest, easiest and cheapest way for any company to get up-and-running with inbound marketing.

The most common form of online content marketing takes the form of a blog. That’s not how it has to be (you can just create pages on your website with content as well), but a lot of work has gone into creating solid blogging platforms which meet the “quickest, easiest and cheapest” criteria and online visitors have grown used to, and comfortable with, the blog format.

It doesn’t matter if the content you provide takes the form of text, video, white papers or any of the other cool online methods of communication, the important thing is that it provides real value to your potential and current customers.

Your content can both:

• Educate – help your customers understand your products and services by answering what, why, how, and when.
• Entertain – whether you make visitors laugh or cry, make sure they remember it so they’ll keep coming back for more.

Your content should NOT be an advertisement. Sure, you can (and should) use personal anecdotes and mention your products and services, but only when it helps demonstrate a point. If your content is purely promotional, you will not realize the most powerful effect of inbound marketing: repeat visits.

Remember that readers are always thinking, “What’s in it for me?” Answer that question and you will satisfy their needs and add value.

Online content marketing’s biggest advantage is that search engines LOVE good content and will reward you by sending folks your way. You can learn more about this in my post, “Search Engines Don’t Hate You: Winning at SEO“.

Learning More About Inbound Marketing

Below are some links to help you learn more about inbound marketing:

• The Sales Lion – this is the blog of Marcus Sheridan who took his local family pool company to the top nationally using inbound marketing.
• Hubspot’s Blog – Hubspot is a suite of tools aimed at helping you with inbound marketing. Whether you use the tool or not, their blog is always full of good tips and suggestions (a perfect example of providing value via content).
• 21 Awesome Inbound Marketing Blogs You Should Be Reading – a handy list of resources I found while looking through Hubspot’s Blog.
• Focus on content leads to successful viral marketing campaign – one of my posts on how a company used a content marketing campaign to successfully find new customers.
• Content design hooks-in customers – another of my posts about the same company which talks about the value of content design to inbound marketing.