Inbound Marketing: Everything You Need to Know

Being at the forefront of marketing sometimes requires shifting resources away from old practices. That’s why 52% of outbound marketers say their marketing efforts are “ineffective”. In fact, inbound marketing is starting to be used more than outbound marketing.

By understanding the effectiveness of inbound marketing, business-to-business (B2B) companies can achieve marketing goals in a faster, more efficient manner than previous efforts.

“33% of inbound marketers and 31% of outbound marketers rank outbound marketing practices, such as paid advertising, as the top waste of time and resources,” per HubSpot in 2016. (More recent research shows most B2B marketers aren’t satisfied with their current mix of inbound vs. outbound tactics regardless of last year’s focus.)



What is Inbound Marketing?

Brian Halligan, the co-founder of Hubspot, first conceived the term “inbound marketing.” Inbound marketing is a growth strategy utilized by marketers to increase brand awareness and drive traffic. Inbound refers to the consumers coming to the business rather than vice versa. Unlike outbound marketing, inbound marketing places the user’s interests first.

Inbound marketing key statistics rather than bombarding potential buyers with banners and TV ads, inbound marketing approaches and connects with prospective customers through useful material and content. This places the power with the buyer rather than the seller. By placing informative material and content throughout, a potential consumer can receive relevant information based on their specific searches.

Here are some commonly used tactics when getting started with inbound marketing:

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) helps make your online content presence more visible and discoverable during search queries. The more relevant the information is to searches, the better the chance it will have to be ranked higher to be seen. Having good software architecture to optimize website navigation experience and search engine optimization could also improve your inbound marketing. Other key components, such as keywords and links, are just the tip of SEO tactics that can be used in your inbound marketing.

Content Marketing

Producing high-quality, useful, non-promotional content is a great way to market and educate potential consumers of your products or services. This valuable, top-of-the-funnel content can rank well in search and drive relevant website traffic. You can incorporate high-quality content by using blogs, news articles, videos, descriptions, and web page copywriting. It is also important to optimize for keyword phrases with a good balance of high monthly search volume and low organic SEO competition.


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