What is Inbound Marketing?
Posted by Dale Berkebile on Thu, Jan 28, 2010
The marketing industry is changing. For the last several years companies have been really focused on finding ROI for their marketing efforts. Few people have been able to make the old forms of marketing prove their ROI so people have been moving to more digital forms or marketing because they can track and measure the results more accurately.
So the idea behind inbound marketing is using marketing to help customer find you instead of old outbound marketing where you were trying to find clients.
So how do customers find you?
Well an Inbound Marketing system will revolve around your web site. You will want to set up your web site around targeted keywords that your prospects would do a search. So you need to understand SEO and apply it to every page on your web site. Every page will need to be focused on one targeted keyword or keyphrase. This will bring this page up in search engines anytime someone does a search on this topic.
The other thing you need to understand is that in order to make a system like this work, you need to create remarkable content on a regular basis.
This is typically done through a blog. Keep in mind each article/page needs to be focused on the targeted keywords that your prospects will search.
The other thing to keep in mind is that you will be building your site around the premise of the Long Tail.
This idea means you will have a lot of pages that only a few people will find or go to. The important thing to remember is that these visitors are extremely targeted because they searched a very targeted keyword. This means thy are very qualified. Obviously the more highly qualified the visitors to your site are, the better or easier it is to convert them into clients. They already know what they want and you are offering it.
Other areas that help the inbound marketing program work are all the social media tools. Use these to promote your web site, blog and remarkable content and to also build a community of followers of your brand.
Once you have a strong inbound marketing system set in place, this is when you can start to add a more integrated marketing approach like direct mail or trade shows all with the goal of sending these prospects to specific landing pages tied to each campaign. All of a sudden, all of your marketing start to become more and more measurable. It really all revolves around a strong inbound marketing web site though. This will be the hub of your success!
See a case study on an Inbound Marketing Web Site Design here. Also learn more about what Brandwise offers with our Inbound Marketing Campaigns here.
