Inbound marketing is perhaps the best way to promote your business online. In fact, over the past five years, inbound marketing has become the most effective strategy to growing a brand, getting in front of a targeted audience, generating qualified leads, and increasing business revenue. Since it focuses on creating and sharing quality-rich content that resonates with your audience, you are essentially attracting ideal customers to your business.
Imagine your sales funnel running over with prospects that are highly interested in your brand. This is what inbound marketing is all about; it draws potential customers to your content, converts these visitors into leads, nurtures them to becoming customers, then builds relationships to create loyal fans.
We’ve gathered five strong reasons why inbound marketing will work for your online marketing and prove that it should be your main strategy to building a strong Internet presence.
#1 You’ll Gain Clarity on Your Real Audience
Creating a working inbound strategy forces you to get crystal clear on your audience, who you’re marketing to, their pains and problems, and the challenges they experience. This is good news because your entire content plan revolves around speaking to their needs and desires. The more focused you are in creating content that resonates with your audience, the more effective you’ll become in attracting the right people to your content.
The best way to gain this clarity is by developing buyer personas. This process positions you to publish content that relates to and captures the attention of your intended audience…a winning tactic to a successful inbound marketing strategy.
#2 Gives Direction to Your Social Media Strategy
Social media marketing is a component of inbound marketing that creates awareness and engages people to your content. Posting on social media humanizes your brand, making you more relatable. The beauty about having an inbound marketing plan is that it serves as a guide for what content (and type of content) to publish on your social sites. This alleviates random, inconsistent postings that is not in alignment with your true marketing goals.
Brands boost exposure and gain more followers when they adopt a sound social media strategy. A clear inbound marketing plan makes this happen!
#3 Inbound Marketing Builds Trust and Credibility
Sharing useful content that offers solutions to your audience will position your brand as the “go-to” guy (or gal) in your niche. You will be viewed as a credible and respected source that people will revert to for information. Customers will trust you because you’re showing them ways to solve their problems and freely giving expert advice they can apply. You’re not trying to push the sale…you’re leading with value which, through lead nurturing, ultimately closes the sale. With value, you build the know, like and trust factor between you and your prospects.
#4 Fills Your Sales Funnel with Qualified Leads
Lead generation is indeed a huge benefit to inbound marketing. It produces a whopping 54% more leads than traditional practices. The more high value and contextual content you add to your site, the more leads you achieve. The advantage to your inbound marketing strategy is that you can create multiple forms of content (i.e. videos, images, infographics, audios) to appeal to different audiences within your target market. When you repurpose your content, you greatly expand your online reach, creating more opportunities to capture leads.
#5 Significantly Improves Your Bottom-Line
Email marketing is another facet of inbound marketing, a vital ingredient to converting prospects into buying customers. Email marketing has a profound effect on ROI and increasing your revenue. Here are a few stats that prove its effectiveness:
- Email marketing works 40 times better at getting customers than Facebook and Twitter, and compared to social media (Source: McKinsey)
- 77% of ROI comes from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns (Source: EmailExpert)
- When it comes to purchases made as a result of receiving a marketing message, email has the highest conversion rate (66%), when compared to social, direct mail and others (Source: Direct Marketing Association)
- Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads (Source: Emma)
- 59% of B2B marketers say email is the most effective channel for generating revenue (Source: Hubspot)
People will buy when they’re ready to buy…yet as you generate leads and cultivate your email list, it provides you with selling opportunities that are more likely to convert because they’re already interested in you. As you continue to share valuable and strategic content that moves them closer to the buying decision, you easily improve your ROI, increasing sales.
Conclusion
Inbound marketing promotes sustainable, long-term growth for your business. When you create content, it doesn’t go away…it’s a piece of online real estate that remains on the web forever, thus providing ample opportunities to reach your audience, engage with, and convert them into loyal customers of your brand. There is real value to embracing inbound for your online marketing; it undoubtedly positions your business to excel online and increases brand exposure when the tactics are executed correctly and consistently.
Ready to implement a winning inbound marketing plan that attracts visitors, leads, and customers to your content? Reach out to us here and let’s chat!
