Inbound Marketing – Marketing For Today and Future

Marketing is fully changed in the past years. Something that has been normal for attracting new customers before 3 to 5 years now is gone. The entrepreneurs must find different ways how to attract potential customers and what is more important how to attract targeted potential customers for their business. Businesses that will don’t change the way how they market their business will spend money on an unproductive campaign and will lose their business potential energy. The type of marketing that is needed for today’s business is inbound marketing as something opposite from outbound marketing.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

First I want to start with something about outbound and then to compare it with the title of this post.

Outbound Marketing

In outbound marketing, businesses and entrepreneurs are focused on finding customers. They use techniques that poorly target potential customers and that has an approach that looks like interrupting people. They use direct mailing, cold-calling, print advertising, radio advertising, newspapers, TV advertising, junk mail, spam, trade shows… This is an approach that Seth Godin famously coined as Interruption Marketing because these tactics will work only if they interrupt the potential customers to get their attention.

This approaches are based on an assumption that if we bombarded potential customers with our messages they will spend several seconds to receive our message and with that we will attract their attention for our business. But, now this interruption can make contra effect of our campaigns. I don’t want to be interrupted when I watch an interesting movie on the TV. I don’t want to be interrupted when I open my postal box and find several letters that I don’t want to read. I don’t want to receive e-mails from businesses that I don’t know, and that I don’t ask for them. All of this interruption can make me very angry and that is contra effect to the people who advertise in that way.

On the other hand, there is technology that can save me from all of these unwanted advertising campaigns and that will make these techniques less effective and more expensive for entrepreneurs. TiVo will make TV advertising less effective, Caller ID will block cold calls, spam filters block mass emails, new tools like RSS are making newspapers and magazines less effective.

Inbound Marketing

This type of marketing  is opposite of everything that we say about outbound marketing.

• In outbound marketing businesses and entrepreneurs are focused on finding customers. In Inbound marketing business and entrepreneurs are focused on things that will help potential customers easily to find them.
• In outbound marketing businesses and entrepreneurs use techniques that have poorly targeted potential customers. Inbound marketing use techniques that have highly targeted potential customers.
• In outbound approaches you interrupt people to get their attention to your business whilst with inbound marketing the potential customer’s search about you because they want to find you.

As we can see it  is all about methods that can make prospects easily finding your business when they are looking forward to finding solution that your product or service offer. It’s about having qualified prospects come to you. Today potential customers have full control of how their media flow, it also includes marketing media. They choose the time when and place where to consume that marketing media.

Because of that inbound marketing is something that is more and more needed for small businesses. But, how to implement it? First you must be present everywhere where your potential customers are. Here are some questions that you as an entrepreneur must answer before starting with inbound marketing:

• Where are potential customers that seeking products and services as products and services that offer my business?
• Can you be there if they are seeking something that you offer?
• How to be the first in their eyes when they are seeking something that you offer?

Let’s think something about it with the traditional media as flyers.  You can put your flyers in all postal boxes in some region that you think that there are potential customers. This is an outbound technique. All people in that region receive the same flyer and most of them immediately go in garbage. But, if your business offer financial consultancy services and you know that local banks are an ideal place where your potential clients are, you can make an agreement with local banks to place your flyers there and if some client wanted to read them, they will take the flyer. It’s inbound marketing.

Internet can make these activities much easier. We know that more and more people when have problems go to Google or different social media to find answers about their problems. And that is a good place for entrepreneurs to utilize the inbound marketing techniques for their businesses. In this way, the focus is on creating powerful content on web pages or social media sites that will bring potential customers to your business, brand, products or services.

If your potential and current customers are on Facebook you must also be there. If they are on Twitter you must also be there. If they are on LinkedIn you must also be there. If they search something related to your business in Google you must be in the first several places on result page.

Why Inbound Marketing?

The things about marketing and reaching targeted customers in recent several years are drastically changed. Only a few years ago most potential customers find solutions for their problems by watching TV commercials, reading newspaper ads, reading magazines, receiving direct mail, listening radio or asking for business from sales persons.

However, now the same potential customers have much more options to search and find the solutions for their problems. They build their own network on different social media where they can ask questions about something. They go to Google and search about something that will solve their problems. And what is most important now they don’t want to be interrupted when watching a TV, or listening to the radio or when reading newspaper. Because of that interruption, the marketing efforts in this way can produce contra effect.

The results from inbound marketing can be great, but they need time to be achieved. Maybe because of that many entrepreneurs don’t want to spend more time to build and maintain the whole process. And that is another factor to motivate you to start as soon as possible.

Good starting point is the book Inbound Marketing – Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, and you can read review that I write about this book here.