Marketing

A Business Owner’s Guide to Marketing

By | February 19, 2016

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We live in a digital age, and things move so fast its hard to keep up sometimes. As businesses and technology changes, the techniques marketers use change as well. Inbound marketing is not new any more, but if you think inbound is about just creating a blog and then trying to get people to read it, you don’t understand the power of inbound marketing.

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is drastically different from traditional marketing. Traditionally companies focused on finding any customers through tactics of interruption via phone, email, or ads. But technology is making traditional marketing ineffective and more difficult. Not only that, traditional marketing tactics like cold calls, ads, and pushing product tend to be intrusive and ineffective.

Inbound is different, its about empowering the right customers, and giving them the power. Its pinpointing specific customers and then giving them an experience they enjoy and want. Its using informative and scientific data to identify who your ideal customer is, understanding your customer, and then creating content that people love – not content that is all about you. Think of the last time you made a purchase, did you call a sales person from a company, or did you look up the product online and try to learn more.

Here are the five themes that differentiate the inbound marketing from traditional marketing:

  • Content Creation + Distribution– Create content that answers targeted audiences’ and customers’ basic questions and needs, then distribute it across the web.
  • Lifecycle Marketing– Develop and nurture your audience along the buyer journey. They start off as strangers and visitors, but specific marketing actions and tools help to form those strangers into customers and promoters.
  • Personalization– Prospects and customers have never liked automated responses or systems. Fill your emails, blogs, and websites with your business’ personality.
  • Integration– Content creation, publishing, and analytics all work together and allow you to focus on distributing the right content to the right audience at the right moment.

Why is all this important?

Its so important to understand what the key of inbound marketing is– it’s not creating a blog and getting thousands of views. The key is getting the right person to see the right content and then creating action. Its quality over quantity, and inbound uses real data to make that difference.

If you would like to learn the 4 steps of executing the inbound methodology into your marketing strategy then please read here!

Or if you would like some helpful tips on using SEO wisely, then download our free ebook!

Download SEO Guide here

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Andrew Coffey
Andrew Coffey