While many business models are still attuned to the traditional “outbound” approach in digital marketing, the lack of awareness of the power of inbound marketing has resulted in companies struggling with increasing brand credibility and customer engagement.
Inbound marketing stands different from traditional outbound marketing in more than one aspect. For one, inbound marketing makes the customer come to you and seek your brand. It is a more effective way to give the customer the experience they are looking for instead of buying the customer out. 80% of business leaders have reported that they prefer getting information about a company via their blog posts and articles rather than advertisements.
Customers prefer to make an informed decision from a well-informed blog post or article about a brand rather than gaining the information from a sell-out advertisement. The success of inbound marketing is largely based on the impression a brand creates in the user’s mind. Unmissable and informational content through mediums like blog posts, educational eBooks, white papers, and primarily SEO-based content attract authentic customers to your brand.
The power of inbound marketing solely lies in the power a brand gives to the user to choose for themselves by the content created.
What Makes Inbound Marketing a Compelling Marketing Strategy?
Inbound marketing has the ability to connect with potential clients across different levels of the client’s journey in the marketing journey. In today’s era, no single party has higher power than the buyer itself. By giving them the authority to choose your brand through inbound marketing, you are ensuring they keep choosing your brand over competitors over and over again.
The simple technique that is the backbone, is letting the customer do their own research and educate themselves about a product and make an informed decision through the content you have provided for them. The main “pull power” of inbound marketing techniques is the valuable content that is created to educate the customer rather than marketing your brand and “buying” potential customers. It essentially focuses on creating a reason for the customer to trust the brand and invest in the brand relationship it has to offer.
The objective of a strong strategy should be a content plan that covers all scenarios across all stages and levels of an ideal buying process. The content should align with all aspects and goals of the potential clientele and ensure it is the solution to all their issues. Interests and genuine prospects will line up to buy your product organically and all this organic traffic will convert in no time.
Now that we have a brief understanding of the “power” of inbound marketing and why it is so effective, let’s look at the nine benefits of inbound marketing.
The Top 9 Benefits of Inbound Marketing You Should Know About
- Boosts Brand Awareness & Trust
- Helps Reduce Marketing Budget
- Helps Attract Higher-Quality Traffic, When Done Right
- Helps Build Long-Lasting Relationships with Your Audience
- Helps Improve Brand Positioning & Establish Your Brand as Industry-Leader
- Aids in Educating Nurtured Prospects
- Adaptable to Businesses of All Sizes & Types
- Opens Doors to New Avenues & Perspectives
- Can Deliver Outstanding Results When Combined with Outbound Marketing
Boosts Brand Awareness & Trust
Brand awareness and image are two of the most important attributes of a brand. It is mainly influenced by the customer’s perspective of the brand and is constructed on the customer’s expectation of the brand. Inbound marketing helps in boosting the brand image and building trust with the client. It does so because the content provided is of greater value and positions the brand as an expert or even a trustworthy expert. The impression your brand leaves on the mind map of the user will lead to generating more potential clients to seek out your brand as you have established your company as a brand of great value.
Helps Reduce Your Marketing Budget
One thing that makes inbound marketing a more effective marketing strategy is the cost factor. Since content is produced only to the requirement, additional marketing costs are reasonably reduced. A well-written blog is all a brand needs to get started in the inbound marketing journey compared to a whole social media ad campaign with outbound marketing. Reduced ad-spend plays a part, as well as the more organic content production. A report by HubSpot stated that inbound marketing leads cost 62% less than outbound leads. However, more investment can be made to increase the efficiency of inbound marketing.
Helps Attract Higher-Quality Traffic, When Done Right
When done right, it can help you attract high-quality traffic and genuine customers who are really interested in what you have to offer. When the content created by a brand is centered around the issues and needs of the target audience, quality traffic and higher conversions are assured. The higher the quality of the content, the more the visits, and the more the conversions, it is simple math. Inbound techniques can produce a significantly higher amount of leads compared to outbound marketing and the leads generated are often of a higher quality.
Builds Long-Lasting Relationships with Your Audience
Inbound marketing is all about providing content of value and solving the issues of the customer. It is essentially about putting yourself in the customer’s shoes, solving their issues, and achieving common goals through your brand. By portraying and proving yourself as a trustworthy brand to help them achieve their goals you are building an unbreakable rapport with the target audience.
Customer and brand engagements are also increased through inbound marketing as bouncing of ideas is encouraged. trust is a two-way street, inbound marketing ensures both sides are addressed and benefit from each other’s common goals for a long period of time.
Helps Improve Brand Positioning & Establish Your Brand as Industry-Leader
Inbound marketing has the potential to boost the confidence of a potential customer in your brand’s capability. How so? Well, you are portraying your brand as the solution to all their issues by creating well-informed, knowledgeable content. You are also highlighting through inbound marketing approaches how you are on top of the game with the latest trends. This not only improves brand image but also depicts your brand as an industry expert and a thought leader.
Aids in Educating Nurtured Prospects
Inbound marketing unlike outbound marketing is based on the client’s perspective. Since you are providing well-curated educational content from the client’s point of view, you are giving them the power to make an informed decision and choose for themselves. In a way, inbound marketing helps in nurturing and educating the prospects so that they are aware of your brand and the industry itself. This is both fruitful for the client as well as for the brand. The content for the user feels more personalized and informative, and the brand has high-quality and educated leads which leads to higher conversions.
Adaptable to Businesses of All Sizes & Types
Inbound marketing is not exclusive to only large-scale organizations. It is very versatile and can be applied to ventures that are just starting out. Any business that has valuable content to put out there can start out just as effectively as a large-scale business. Since inbound marketing comparatively requires a lower budget, it is easily adaptable by SMBs as well. Large-scale businesses also use inbound marketing as an effective technique to their advantage.
Opens Doors to New Avenues & Perspectives
Inbound marketing can quite effectively open portals to new opportunities for a brand. It provides a platform for a company as a whole to grow and explore new ventures. There is a constant urge to feed on customer feedback and competition, to grow as a brand, and improve your brand position with inbound marketing. Inbound marketing provides a transparent measure to track your performance and constantly seek new opportunities.
Check out this post on how to makes your lead generation campaign successful
Can Deliver Outstanding Results When Combined with Outbound Marketing
What makes inbound marketing a powerful marketing tool is its versatility. It can be used with a combination of outbound marketing techniques to boost sales and brand image at the same time. When used hand-in-hand with traditional marketing approaches, it becomes an all-encompassing campaign to secure leads across different levels. Inbound marketing has been proven to strengthen outbound marketing strategies and diversify sales.
Conclusion
Inbound marketing is an effective tool because of the value of the content created. At the crux of a successful inbound marketing campaign lies the fact that you are in the customer’s viewpoint and want to provide what they exactly want.
The golden approach to achieving a rewarding inbound marketing strategy is to understand what the client’s needs are and discuss common goals. The foundation of inbound marketing is based on the quality of the content and how well you as a brand understand your client to what lengths. The higher the value you bring to your customer, the stronger the relationship, the better the brand credibility, and eventually the higher the success.
