Marketing is changing. The old methods of cold calling, direct mail shots and pushy emails are being ignored and deleted by today’s savvy consumers. In a digital world that threatened to become increasingly distant, a fascinating new approach stands out as the future of marketing.
Known as ‘inbound marketing’, it has become the most powerful way to communicate, drive sales and raise the level of customer experience. The difference comes from the very way businesses engage with their customers and clients.
Inbound marketing is all about the conversation. It’s about helping and supporting your customers with interesting content that guides and informs them, rather than just the ‘hard sell’. Ultimately, it’s about connecting and becoming more human, rather than a faceless entity, and about adding value to their interaction with you.
For the companies that are embracing, and succeeding, with inbound marketing, gone are the pushy sales teams, interrupting cold calls and frustrating, boring emails.
Instead, when done right, inbound marketing helps potential customers find your company, builds their trust in your brand and increases their confidence in your product and services.
Attracting customers to you
Inbound marketing is about connecting and engaging directly with your target audience. This helps them to see you as knowledgeable and informed, improving trust in your advice, products and services and helping customers to feel you’re not just interested in their money, but that you care about their success and wellbeing too.
This could include using social media platforms, search engine optimisation (SEO), content marketing, emails, blog posts, podcasts, online videos and press releases to share helpful tips and advice, answer commonly asked questions and to find out exactly how users feel about your business, products and services.
The new approach will help you attract potential customers and convert them into visitors on your website and social media, ultimately creating new and repeat customers, and champions who promote your company to their friends and family.
It has been shown that inbound marketing provides an improved customer experience and is a great way of building trust with the company. This is proving increasingly important, for example in light of the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica scandal.
This method of marketing has also been seen to generate leads for less money when compared with outbound marketing, i.e. traditional marketing methods, such as paid advertising, direct mail or cold calling.
Inbound marketing:
- Costs 62% less per lead than outbound marketing
- 70% of consumers would prefer to build awareness of a brand from their content, rather than their adverts
- Companies that update their blog regularly get 126% more leads than those that don’t share content
- 67% of online adults use social media to share information
How it works
A good example of inbound marketing working effectively is posting a strong piece of content, for instance on social media, as a newsletter or in a blog, which will deliver both immediate and long-term benefits.
The content brings instant attention to your business as soon as it is posted, and continues to inform users as long as it can be found online. The content can then become an ongoing source of inbound traffic via SEO, social shares and word-of-mouth.
Can you really afford not to invest in inbound marketing? To find out how Fastnet Marketing can help you and your business achieve better brand awareness and benefit from this new approach, give us a call on 01326 250879 or email us at thecrew@fastnet.agency
