The world of marketing is constantly evolving and enterprising businesses are always looking for new avenues to reach out to their already loyal base or even prospective customers. In the digital age, this pursuit has spilled over to the internet and social media. This has created a new industry of digital marketing that helps businesses (like yours) compete in a digital battle for consumer attention.
Outbound Marketing…
…(also known as traditional marketing) is trying to reach people through methods such as television and radio advertising, direct mail, and billboards. These methods have their place as people need to be exposed to your brand so they know where to look when they need your expertise. This is useful to pique the interest of customers, but these methods also face some challenges. You can fast forward through television ads, you pass billboards doing 70 miles-an-hour so you aren’t paying attention, and direct mail has almost become synonymous with junk mail. Also, outbound marketing only serves to make the customer aware that you are there and that there is a solution to a problem they may have. With outbound marketing, there is no follow-up with customers to help them make decisions.
That’s where inbound marketing comes in…
Inbound marketing involves creating content to help consumers make decisions and hopefully pick your product. Inbound marketing catches potential consumers through internet searches or on their social media of choice and draws them in with your compelling message and product. This helps buyers complete the cycle from awareness to actually sealing the deal.
Don’t just take my word for it though. Take a look at the stats for yourself and see the trends. 79% of North American marketers use inbound marketing methods, and 75% of those marketers find the approach effective (only 62% of outbound marketers think their approach is effective). Not only do the vast majority of inbound marketers have confidence in their approach, 53% of marketers see increased ROI from using inbound marketing methods.
Inbound marketers are focusing heavily on the strengths of inbound marketing by trying to convert contacts/leads into customers (77% of North American marketers consider it a top priority) and increasing traffic to their website (55% of North American marketers consider it a top priority). Inbound marketers are also focusing on advertising over video channels with Youtube, LinkedIn, and Facebook being the most popular.
So you’re considering adopting an inbound marketing strategy…
…but you want to know what unique challenges are involved with inbound marketing. Some of the most frequent challenges that marketers face is growing SEO/ organic presence, blog content creation, marketing automation, content distribution/amplification, interactive content creation, Longform creation (ebooks, whitepapers), and visual content creation (infographics).
This sounds like a lot to tackle along with running your business. So don’t worry about it. Let us help. At Little Red Writing we specialize at solving these problems and putting your business in the best light. So contact us so we can start drawing customers in for you.
All statistics provided by HubSpot’s 2018 State of Inbound.
