2015 is just around the corner. Do you have your marketing plans solidified for the upcoming year? If inbound marketing is in your future (as it should be), you will enjoy the list of the top six ways inbound marketing can benefit your company in 2015.
6 Ways Inbound Marketing Can Benefit Your Company In 2015:
1. Save Money
Sound too good to be true? Not for inbound marketers. Inbound marketing can be significantly less expensive than traditional outbound marketing. According to HubSpot, inbound marketing costs 62 percent less than traditional outbound marketing. Instead of targeting audience members where you think they are (ie print ads, billboards), you can target them where you know they are, ultimately saving you from wasting time and dollars.
2. Get Your Company Found Easier By Search Engines And Build Credibility
A successful inbound strategy will work to get your brand to the top of the search results pages. This will not only lead to an increase in traffic to your site, but it will also position you as a credible resource within your industry. The further up in search results rankings you are, the more likely people are to trust you. Rarely do people go past the first page of search engine results. By being on the first page, this establishes you as one of the top 10 experts within your industry or topic searched for. Establishing authority and building trust will lead to more site visits, more leads, and in turn, more customers.
3. Increase Brand Awareness
Boosting your ranks to the top of search engine results pages, especially Google, will draw new users to your site. Users who regularly search terms that you rank well for will start to see your name pop up more frequently. The more they see you in their search results, the more likely they are to go to your page and engage in your content. This will increase your audience and following above those that were already aware of your product or service.
4. Get More Qualified Leads
Inbound marketing isn’t focused on getting your sales team as many leads as possible. What it is focused on, however, is getting your sales team the most qualified leads as possible, meaning the lead has shown some sort of interest in your company. This way, your sales team isn’t blindly pitching people, but rather talking to people who are already engaged with your product, making them more likely to close a sale.
To get qualified leads, you need to know your buyer persona and create content that solves a problem of theirs and provides value. From there, you can track patterns of the leads to gauge interest and actions, which will help your sales team when making a sale. This is very difficult to do with outbound marketing which is often less targeted and appeals to the masses.
5. Improve Customer Relationships
Inbound marketing is customer focused and allows you to build customer relationships. How? It focuses on providing valuable content for your potential customers in hopes to get more knowledge about them, which in turn will help you create better content for your audience as a whole. By providing value to your customers, and fostering these relationships, the odds of you extending your market reach, growing new leads, and closing more sales grows exponentially.
6. Track Results And Increase ROI
Inbound marketing provides in-depth marketing results that your company can utilize in future marketing efforts. By seeing specific areas you are excelling in, and areas that can use improvement, you can use this information target your strengths, and drop your weaknesses. This will allow you to optimize the areas that are bringing in the most revenue. As you do so, your ROI will increase along with it.
What else has inbound marketing done for your company? Please leave your comments below.