What is Inbound Marketing?

Think of Inbound Marketing as “pull” marketing!   Traditional advertising is considered “push” marketing, visitors visit an ad and are “pushed” to a location by various incentives – sales, coupons, free shipping, etc..  Inbound marketing or “pull” marketing incentivizes a customer to a location by offering value with information, knowledge, and advice.  The customer is “pulled” to the location by offering specific benefits about a product or service they are searching for.

For example, a visitor is looking for information on planting a garden.  They search online and find two entries, 1) an offer to “save 20% on all of your gardens needs”  the visitor would need to visit a website or a brick-and-mortar store to secure the savings and the information they are looking for.  2) an invitation to download a white paper on “what you need to know to plant your first garden”.  The visitor clicks the link to a landing page that provides a brief description of the document and a clear call to action to download the white paper.

When the customer provides contact information, they are sent an email message with further valuable information such as:  “Thanks for providing us with your email, we hope you found the gardening document helpful.  Attached you will find a calendar with the key dates of when you should plant specific plants.  Also, here is a list of garden stores and websites that carry our products.”

The key to Inbound Marketing is providing relevant, authentic and purposeful content that is helpful and actionable for the customer.   The objective of Inbound Marketing is to become a trusted and credible resource for your customers, so they continue to return to you for your products and services.

Consider the old proverb: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”. In theory, the desired outcome of Inbound Marketing is similar to this proverb, if you give a customer one-time savings they may only visit with you once, if you can educate the customer and become a valuable resource, you will earn a customer for a lifetime.

Would you like to learn more about Inbound Marketing? Or if you would like to get started with an Inbound Marketing campaign, give us a call at (336) 638-1651. Not quite ready, no problem, if you would like to receive more valuable information or just stay in touch, give us your name and email.

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