Inbound Marketing Mojo – School in session

A good exit approach is one in which a marketer is dedicated to spreading the promotional messages of the company to the target audience. Inbound marketing companies prefer to use the other option, and that is the pull approach. The pull approach is designed to share messages with those who are already looking for the products and services that the organization offers. The bottom line is that facts are facts – all conventional exit techniques, including direct marketing and telemarketing, are no longer king of the hill. Each conventional exit technique generates only 10 percent of leads. Two-thirds of brands prefer inbound approaches to promote their business and reach their audience.

Entry methods such as organic rankings, paid search, and PPC are rapidly gaining traction. Presence and engagement on social media is another inbound marketing topic that is becoming more and more impactful.

So, have you made the transition with your business? Are you still thinking about if and when?

Understandably, these are rapidly changing times in terms of marketing paradigms, there is no question about that. However, we can summarize a few reasons why you might want to consider making the switch, sooner rather than later.

Reasons to make the switch to Inbound Marketing strategies

There are several reasons why inbound marketing trumps outbound marketing. One reason may be the long-term value of inbound marketing campaigns, as opposed to the “fast-growing” qualities of typical direct marketing campaigns. Through inbound marketing, marketers invest in long-term value in the face of those rapid and temporary increases in traffic, which are undoubtedly a staple of traditional outbound marketing campaigns. You send 20,000 postcards and you get a surge of activity. Ebb and flow. However, with inbound marketing, it is a continuous campaign that feeds over time and the results are distributed over a much longer period of time.

Inbound marketing can be divided into numerous relatively simple actions. However, it will take a concerted effort to put together all of those simple tasks to bring an effective entry strategy to fruition.

One of the fundamental tasks is deciding what content is going to be shared with your target audience. We live in the digital age and as people are exposed to more and more information and digital marketing, they have developed mechanisms in the brain to help process and filter that information. Simply put, people filter 90% of the marketing messages they see online. So how do we pass the filter?

There are many forms, such as powerful calls to action, but our focus here is on visual media – images, infographics, and videos. Humans are extremely visual creatures. It’s getting harder and harder to get past the filter with just words. Instead, we use our natural inclination towards visual engagement. That is why visual media is a centerpiece of an effective inbound marketing strategy.

So now we know what kind of content to share – focus on visually appealing media. Now, we have to figure out which platform to use to share those media. You guessed it: we want to use the social media hubs that have the highest visitor usage and popularity: Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Google+, and other Web 2.0s.

Next, we have to decide how often we will share visually appealing content on those popular social media hubs. The best approach is to reach a minimum threshold of activity in at least 3 centers, perhaps Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr or, if you prefer, Facebook, Twitter and Google+. When we say reaching a minimum threshold of activity, we mean completely filling out your profile for your business and then interacting with others on those sites as necessary to start securing some followers / fans / likes / more 1 on those sites.

Now, once you have reached the minimum threshold, you can focus on 1 or 2 and increase your activity. For Facebook, a great approach is to write some short, engaging posts, attach engaging photos, and then make one-time “boosts” of those posts where you basically pay per thousand impressions through Facebook’s CPM network. A tutorial on Facebook Ads is beyond the scope of this article. But trust me, it’s pretty intuitive. And the idea is to write and share, then “push” the selected posts to where you want. $ 20 per post for the former is sufficient. Once you have your audience growing, you can choose to let it grow organically, occasionally boost, or boost all of your posts. That part is up to you and it depends on your online marketing goals. Again, the idea here is to pick a few popular hubs and get the ball rolling.

So this is basically what inbound marketing is all about. It’s about allowing your prospects to find you rather than getting your marketing message out to the masses in the hopes that it will reach a potential customer (as in traditional outbound marketing). There is no need to feel overwhelmed. There is no time like the present, as they say. So why wait? Go ahead and take the step!