You may have heard the term “inbound marketing” being thrown about here and there, and even more increasingly recently. But, what exactly is it?
The Same Plan Will No Longer Get You The Same Results
Traditional marketing—or, “outbound marketing”—is what most businesses have been doing for years and years. They advertise both online and offline, they hold seminars in hopes to shed a small amount of light on their expertise so that they might find a few potential clients in the audience, and they cold call endlessly.
These tactics are becoming far less effective. Each person is bombarded with thousands of advertisements each day, most of which go unnoticed. If the majority of people are tuning out the messages you are trying to send, and your message never gets delivered, why bother?
Enter Inbound Marketing
In an age of constant change, continual technological advancement, and one where the control lies completely in the hands of the buyer, our plan needs to change. We can no longer expect to get the same results from the plan we have used for years. Instead of wasting the majority of our efforts on the same tactics we’ve been using, we must speak to our audience in a language (and on a platform) that they not only understand but pay attention to.
Inbound marketing is simple and far more cost effective than outbound marketing. It consists of three basic steps:
- Search Engine Optimization
- Blogs
- Social Media
Your online presence is key to success in the 21st century. Or, this decade at least. (Given the current rate of change, who knows what our world will look like with 40% of the population being born after 1990 by the year 2020.)
How much are you spending on outbound marketing? How much have you saved by using inbound marketing?