What is Inbound Marketing: The Mystery is Revealed

The old ways of marketing are dying. They simply do not work that well anymore. The future of marketing is Internet marketing via inbound marketing tools.

Traditional marketing uses a bulldozer approach at advertising to basically force potential customers to hear their message. This type of advertising has lost much of its effectiveness and is not producing the ROI it did in the past.

Inbound marketing is different. Instead of forcing customers to see/hear your advertising message, you instead entice customers to come to you. You offer your product or service to them when they need it most, and that is usually when they are researching the Internet and looking to buy what you are selling.

But what makes inbound marketing such a great tool for generating leads for businesses?

Inbound marketing uses Internet tools to bring customers to a business’s website. Search engine optimization coupled with useful content (blogs, games, contests, videos, free ebooks, free reports, etc.) makes people more interested in what a business is selling.

People will subscribe to a business’s blog far more often than they will pick-up their phone to call a company to ask questions about a product.  The Internet is a pressure free environment that customers appreciate. Yes, it takes time and money to create videos, articles, and webinars for potential clients to view,but it is work it. Inbound marketing generates more products sold and more leads than virtually any other marketing tool available, and at a higher ROI.

Once a visitor has reached your businesses landing page they see a call to action via an email subscription or other method of collecting information that prompts them to become a lead. Of course, a landing page has to be well put together with content that will actually give the customer information they would not have had access to if they had not visited your webpage.

Once you have an email or contact information you can then market your products to them in a noninvasive way, in fact they are the ones asking you for more information! You can then turn them into customers by effectively focusing your advertising to fit their needs.

After you have made contacts and possibly sold items, you would do well to integrate a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) that allows you to make sure your marketing team and sales team are working together to generate the best leads.

Co-written by Peter Geisheker and Alanna Monical