Inbound marketing has a lot of benefits to offer especially to small businesses that have limited marketing budgets.
The gains from a successful inbound marketing strategy are bigger than traditional outbound marketing and the ROI is higher.
What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is not something new, it’s a term that has circulated in the marketing world for almost a decade. In simple terms, inbound marketing is about content, attention, engagement, trust, and satisfaction. All these elements have a single goal: to help businesses connect with their potential customers and establish a channel of bi-directional communication with them that will lead to more sales.
The increase in the number of people using the Internet for everything they want (information, products, services, leisure) and the rapid rise of social media networks has led to the generation of a new model of selling online. This model has content marketing as the starting point for any inbound marketing campaign.
What are the benefits of inbound marketing?
So, inbound marketing has to do with techniques for organically reaching your customers and not in a destructive way. By following this approach, what do you have to gain as a business?
- It’s cost-effective : When talking about business and benefits, the first thing that comes to mind is cost. Inbound marketing can generate leads for a company (of all sizes) in a much cheaper manner than outbound marketing.
As you can see in the graph below, small businesses can generate leads from inbound marketing by spending only ⅓ of what it costs them to get a lead from traditional outbound marketing.
This is very important, especially for businesses that have small budgets and want to make efficient use of every dollar they spend on marketing. - It’s long-lasting : Remember that the goal of inbound marketing is to build connections with your customers. This means that it’s not a once-off relation but it’s something that will last for more time provided that you have established trust.
Let’s take for example blogging and SEO, which are among the most popular tools of inbound marketing.
When your blog provides consistently great content and implements good SEO practices what is the result? In the beginning, you will reach a few customers since SEO is a process that takes time to work but after a few months, your rankings will increase, and the traffic will start to flow in not just once but hopefully for a long time.
Take for example social media. Once you have a strong presence on Facebook with thousands of fans on your business page, what is the outcome? You can reach out to your audience (or to a portion of it) and connect with them every time you update your Facebook page and this comes at no cost (assuming that you want to reach them organically and not through paid Facebook ads).
The same goes for email marketing and any other inbound method. Once you can provide content that your potential customers want to read and that you have gained their trust by establishing your authority on the subject, everything else becomes easier - Reach new markets and audiences : The fact that inbound marketing is purely executed online, allows you to reach new audiences and diversify your reach by running different types of campaigns.
For example, let’s say that you are selling ‘SEO services online and you decide to add ‘social media services ‘to your list of products.
With traditional marketing and because the profile of both customers is the same (when it comes to TV or radio advertising or other traditional methods), you could not easily make the segmentation and target only those that need one but not both services.
With inbound marketing and PPC in particular, you reach people looking for social media services by targeting only those keywords in your PPC campaigns.
This is just a simple example but the fact that you can select exactly and in great detail who will see your content has huge advantages and that’s why the ROI is higher. It’s more targeted, more relevant and it goes out to people that need it without reaching out to a larger group of people hoping that some will be interested in your products or services - It’s immediate : Someone is looking to buy a product online, they find your website by searching Google for that product, they read your content which has everything they need to know about that product, they trust your store as being reliable and safe and they purchase the product from you.
This is the ideal scenario and of course, this is not always the case but it’s possible with inbound marketing. With outbound, it’s a different story as there are more steps added to the process that make it more complex and not immediate.
Take for example radio ads, someone while driving listens to a product ad and finds it interesting. After he goes home (and if he still remembers the ad), he will search the internet and find the products in the ad. Then he will follow the inbound marketing path (as explained above) but still may not buy since this is not something that he wanted (unlike the case of searching for it in Google) - Build authority and brand awareness : So far all the benefits outlined above have to do with costs and sales but this is not always the only marketing goal of companies.
There are cases where you want to build your brand name and raise awareness about your company or change the perception people have about your products.
Inbound marketing is the perfect solution for this, not only it can help you spread the word and make your brand known but indirectly this will generate more leads and sales in the future.
You can make use of social media, quality blog posts, slideshows, infographics, PPC, and SEO (to name a few tools), to get your brand in front of thousands of prospects and educate them about your company without them understanding that you are trying to ‘shape’ their opinion about your company.
Talking about authority and perception, take a look at what HubSpot managed to do with inbound marketing. They invested heavily in educating people about it and are now considered the ‘authority’ resource on inbound marketing.
