Contents
What is Inbound Marketing?
By providing valuable information to your target audience, you drive visitors to your site, thus generating leads and increased sales. Inbound Marketing is a marketing method that aims to attract customers by creating valuable content tailored to them.
Examples of marketing included in Inbound Marketing are
- blogs
- Social Media
- Guides
- Video
- podcasts
- webinars
Inbound Marketing is about understanding your target audience in depth. Creating educational materials helps people make good decisions about what products and services they want to buy.
Why Inbound Marketing is Popular Today
Inbound Marketing is popular because it helps people seeking answers to their questions while generating sales to the company. Inbound Marketing gives you the power to give the customer exactly the information they are looking for exactly when they need it. The Internet has changed how customers absorb information and how they buy products.
- 94% of B2B buyers search for information on the web at some point during the purchase decision.
- 74% of B2B buyers do more than half of their online research.
- 59% of B2B buyers prefer to search for information on the web rather than contacting a seller.
Today, customers search for information before making a purchase, to a greater extent than before. This means that companies that provide their customers with useful information when they search for it have the chance to build trust and thus become the one who wins the customer. Customers have gained more power and the companies that in an educational way provide their customers with useful information are winning.
Difference between Inbound and Outbound Marketing
Inbound Marketing is about earning the attention of its target audience through relevant content that answers their questions. Outbound Marketing is when a company initiates the conversation and sends the message to its target audience.
Examples of Outbound Marketing are paid advertising such as Facebook advertising, TV advertising, radio and newspaper advertising. Inbound Marketing is pull marketing and outbound marketing is push marketing.
Benefits of Inbound Marketing
The main advantage of Inbound Marketing is that it provides you with new customers in an educational way. You help your customers instead of being pushy as with paid advertising.
With Inbound Marketing, you create a deep understanding of your customers and win their trust by providing them with useful information at the right moment. An example is when you answer potential customers’ most frequently asked questions in blog format on your web page.
Companies that best answer potential customers’ questions when looking for information build credibility and thus increase their opportunity to gain new customers.
Another advantage of Inbound Marketing is that it is long-term since materials such as e.g. a blog can generate traffic and new customers for a long time to come.
Disadvantages of Inbound Marketing
One disadvantage of Inbound Marketing is that it can take a long time before you see results. For example, if you are writing blog posts, it can take months before you start getting visitors.
Another disadvantage of Inbound Marketing is that it requires large resources in the form of working hours. You need to understand your target audience and understand their challenges in-depth to create useful content. Well done Inbound Marketing takes time.
How to get started with Inbound Marketing
A good first step is to take the Inbound Marketing course at HubSpot. In the course, you will learn the basics of Inbound Marketing as well as basic tactics.
A great way to get started with Inbound Marketing at your business is to answer your customers’ most common questions. Start by holding a workshop where you gather employees who are in daily contact with your customers such as seller or CEO. Then write a list of the most common questions you get from your customers. Slimming down that list to the 10 most common questions and answering those questions on your web page in the form of a blog, for example.
