If you are responsible marketing or sales at your company, chances are you’ve heard the terms Inbound Marketing or Inbound Lead Generation by now, and the concept has more than likely caught your attention, at least for the fact that it could substantially improve the quality and quantity of sales leads for your organization without increasing your budget.
After all, if you could create a system that delivered more of the right prospective customers to your door without spending more on advertising, then you could focus your time and energy on closing new business rather than prospecting, cold calling, and constantly reinventing advertising campaigns that deliver little to no results.
What is Inbound Marketing and why is it unique?
Inbound Marketing is the process of delivering prospective customers to you, versus the more traditional methods of advertising and marketing to reach out to prospective customers.
In the past, organizations had to spend a substantial amount of their budgets to place ad messages in newspapers, direct mail, radio, television, yellow pages, and other media. To create the ads for these campaigns, they would spend thousands of dollars to craft a message and creative that they hoped would deliver prospective clients to contact them.
They may also have paid salespeople to cold-call prospects based on the industry they were in or information they had about those individuals. They had to hope that their assumptions were correct about what would get those prospects to buy from them; otherwise they had just wasted thousands of dollars on a campaign that wouldn’t work, and they wouldn’t know if it did until they had already spent their budget.
See the potential problems with the above scenario? If you didn’t have a budget to compete on the right advertising platforms, or you chose the wrong ad message and/or creative, or your prospective customers weren’t open to cold calls or direct mail, you would have had a serious problem. You may have just lost your entire budget on a failing campaign.
This is where Inbound Marketing has changed the game.
No longer is it about ‘spraying and praying’ a message out to the masses; now businesses and organizations can focus on driving the right prospective customers directly to them.
If they come to you, they’ve already shown a level of interest, and you can focus your energy and budget on the high-quality leads that have a strong chance of buying from you.
For Inbound Marketing to work well, it’s important to identify your ideal prospective customers and provide the information they are looking for within your website and blog. Then you can use email marketing, social media, public relations and online marketing channels to drive them directly to that information.
Once you have a flow of quality visitors coming to your website, you’ll want to have conversion paths established so that they have next steps to lead them through the process of landing on your site, reading your content, and moving forward into the buying cycle.
It’s important to establish these paths early on, to ensure that all prospects have an easy trail to follow once they land on your site, and to ensure you don’t miss out on any new business due to people not finding what they’re looking for.
Are you ready to learn more about how Inbound Marketing can work for your business or organization? Contact us today to start building a custom program to lead prospects IN and reduce your outbound marketing and sales efforts.
