What is Inbound Marketing?
Simply put, inbound marketing is differentiated from outbound marketing in that it relies upon being searched online by potential customers. Companies of all sizes have begun to refocus their marketing efforts towards taping into a medium that is far less expensive to manage, and far more accurate in its measurement of a company's customer acquisition costs. Today's smaller enterprises can measure the success of their inbound marketing strategies at a granular level. They can determine their costs of new customers at a fraction of the cost of having a fulltime marketing team. A small business website and blog can be used to reach a much wider audience than what is conceivable with outbound strategies. More importantly, small businesses can dial into the most inexpensive ways to reach customers, and they can do this far more easily through inbound marketing. How is this possible?
The Costs of Inbound Marketing
When thinking of outbound strategies, think of the high costs associated with TV and radio advertisements. Think of how print and magazine advertisements are predicated on searching for customers and how much these strategies are difficult to track in terms of their effectiveness. Finally, think of how important it is to track where a company's leads come from. Tracking leads from outbound strategies is time consuming, difficult and costly.
Without an ability to effectively track these leads, companies can never dial into the most inexpensive way to reach customers. Large companies can, but smaller ones don't have the resources or the capital to make it work. It's ultimately the reason why corporations had large marketing departments, ones that could dominate a market by segmenting their customer bases in ways their smaller competitors simply couldn't.
Inbound strategies level the playing field and provide smaller enterprises with a way to tap into a global marketplace, one where customers are always but a few keystrokes away. They can appear much larger than they are and convey a professionalism and knowledge that would simply be too costly to convey with outbound strategies.
• This can be done through online advertising strategies such as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns that direct potential customers to the small enterprise's website.
• Organic search engine optimization can be used to increase a website's PageRank and increase its traffic.
• Social media platforms and forums offer smaller companies an opportunity to directly reach customers at a zero cost structure.
• Videos can be uploaded directly to video sharing sites like YouTube and then placed directly on the website itself. The costs are relegated to the time it takes to put a video together.
Small business marketing doesn't need to be complicated. It doesn't need to be expensive and it simply doesn't require a large marketing department. Today's small businesses can appear much larger than they are and they can directly challenge their larger competitors.
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