Taking inbound marketing back to the basics

I’ve been doing this a lot of years. Marketing, that is. I’ve learned the industry, adapted to the new digital era of marketing, and have since built my business around inbound marketing. Often, we get caught up in all of the bells and whistles of Internet marketing, but we forget the basics of what makes it all come together.

Let’s bring inbound marketing back to the basics. What is it? Why do we use it? Why is it effective?

Traditionally, marketers would shell out hundreds… even thousands of dollars on outbound marketing techniques, like creating a billboard to be placed in hopes that your prospects will drive by during the time the billboard is up. Television advertisements work similarly, where you invest on coming up with a television commercial concept, write the script, shoot the commercial, produce the final cut and ultimately pay to put it on the air. Mind you, television commercials are becoming even less effective as now our prospects have learned how to turn off the noise, with their DVRs and skipping over commercials. All of these avenues of traditional marketing expire. What’s happened within the last couple years is marketers discovered that people were starting to search the Internet for information on products and services before they made a purchase or subscription. So, they took that discovery and ran with it.

Inbound marketing has proven time and time again to be more effective and less costly than traditional marketing. Rather than sending messages to massive amounts of people at a time, we as marketers want to target the right message, to the right people, at the right time. We want our products and services to be found when people go searching. One of the main ways of doing this is search engine optimization, and building an effective business blog. 

Inbound marketing methodology

Because inbound marketing has become so complex, it can get tricky when trying to figure out the best strategies to tackle first. In some cases, companies and organizations take on this task themselves. That is, creating and or maintaining their website and social media on their own. Social media is quite a labour intensive task as it is, and not having someone dedicated to it more often than not will normally lead to an ineffective use of time and money. Now, there are marketing agencies out there who eat, breathe and dream marketing, and organizations and companies are starting to hire these agencies to do their marketing for them. This is becoming an effective practice yielding a positive return on investments. Hiring an inbound marketing agency can be tricky, and you want to make sure you make best use of your time and money you invest into an inbound marketing agency. I’ve written a guide to hiring an inbound marketing agency that will help you navigate the questions and process of hiring an agency.. If you’re ready to take your marketing to the next level, but are unsure how or have noticed that your current efforts aren’t yielding desired results, this download is for you. You want to make sure you seek the right advice, and the hire the right talent to take charge of your marketing.

Now, not only is it important to have an effective business blogging practice in place, and have someone who knows what they’re doing maintaining it; creating and maintaining an effective Facebook fanpage is also important. With more than one billion active users, there is absolutely no doubt that your customers are on Facebook! Why not go after them too? Now, you have to be careful though. You are competing with their family photos, friend’s status updates and a plethora of other business marketing being driven their way. This is why you have to make sure you do Facebook fanpages right. Take a look at my eBook, “Creating an Effective Facebook Fanpage.” I’ve included 13 great tips that will help you make sure you’re getting the most of your Facebook efforts.

We’ve only touched on the tip of the iceberg in terms of the many tactics to realize inbound marketing… that is, there is so much more to making marketing efforts effective and making good use of your money. Let’s make sure your marketing is yielding you the right results, and ultimately reaching new prospects. Do you know where your inbound marketing is at right now? Contact me for a free inbound marketing assessment. I’d love to take a look and see where you’re doing well and where you can improve.

Click below for a free inbound marketing assessment.