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Inbound Marketing: The Powerful Online Strategy To Generating Leads
If you want to be successful online nowadays, a website alone is not enough. You need a place online where you can tell the world about you, and start developing relationships with people online in a scalable kind of way.
What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing was founded on the basis that traditional marketing and advertising like billboards and TV spotshave become less effective. It’s about being found by the people who are already learning about and shopping in your industry, rather than marketing to the masses and hoping for the best.
The infographic below from cmswire.com shows that 86 percent of viewers skip commercials and 44 percent of recipients never open direct mail. In contrast companies that blog have 55 percent more website visitors than those that don’t (!) and inbound marketing leads cost 60 percent less on average. However, inbound marketing does requiere a lot of time and effort to create valuable, authentic content which is key to success.
The concept of inbound marketing is illustrated by these five stages:
- Attract traffic
- Convert visitors to leads
- Convert leads to sales
- Turn customers into repeat higher margin customers
- Analyze for continuous improvement
How to get started
If you consider trying the inbound marketing strategy for your company, start by including the following ingredients:
- A website (with a well structured sitemap)
- A blog (with thoughts and ideas related to your business, your industry)
- An SEO, Search Engine Optimisation, strategy. It’s a way to use your time to maximum benefit – and maximize the chance of the right people finding you online.
- Social media – use it to distribute your blog posts, but also to engage with clients and potential clients and use it as a powerful custumor service tool.
- Lead nurturing – this is the process, over time, in which you convert website visitors into customers. You do this by offering them something of value for free in exchange for their email address or twitter handle so you can ‘talk’ to them directly. Every now and again you send them something else of value. Something educational or entertaining.
As said before, it takes a lot of time and effort and you’re in it for the long run. Still, the results will make it all worth your while if you do it the right way.
