What is Inbound Marketing?

What sort of marketing do you currently do? If you’re not yet harnessing the power of the internet to find new customers, your list may well look something like this:

• Cold calling
• Direct mail
• Trade shows
• Telesales
• Print advertising
• Email mailshots

Traditional marketing tools like the ones above have one big problem – they all play the numbers game. Because you are targeting people randomly, and those people are likely to have no prior knowledge of your products/services, you have to contact huge numbers of people to get enough responses to convert to sales. Though traditional marketing can be successful, it’s more likely to be expensive, time consuming and an inefficient use of resources.

Traditional marketing could be described as “outbound marketing” – where you reach out to cold targets via a range of tools, and persuade them to buy from you. Wouldn’t it be great if your targets came straight to you – and were already warm leads because they understood your company and were interested in your products?

It can happen. It does happen. It’s known as “inbound marketing” and it happens through using the power of the internet.

What is inbound marketing?

Quite simply, inbound marketing involves raising awareness of your products so that interested people come directly to you. There are a number of tools you can use for inbound marketing, for example:

• Blogs
• Social media
• Articles
• SEO
• Webinars
• Videos
• eBooks
• Opt-in email newsletters

Inbound marketing tools are designed to bring potential customers to you, rather than you having to find leads. The best inbound marketing brings people – traffic – into a central hub, which is normally your website. Because people have arrived of their own will, you already know they are interested in what you’re doing and by engaging with them you have a much better chance of selling to them.

The big advantage of inbound marketing is the tools – blog sites, social media networks etc – are inexpensive, or even free to use. The disadvantage is that you need to commit to an inbound marketing campaign and it takes time both to fully understand the tools and to implement them effectively – time that you may not have.

That’s where HodgesNet comes in. We understand inbound marketing and we can build you a bespoke inbound marketing campaign that works. If you’re interested in finding out how inbound marketing could work for you, give us a call on +44(0)8432 894 402 or fill in the contact form on the right, and we’ll arrange a no-obligation chat.

Hub photo (c) Graphican

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