Is Inbound Marketing Really Lovable?

Most companies spend most of their time, effort and money; developing advertisements and campaigns that are seeking potential customers.

Who would want to push their product or service on consumers that aren't even slightly interested or have a need for your product or service?

Unfortunately, companies using outbound marketing tactics typically implement this method; smothering potential prospects before they even visit your site.

You might be wondering what is the difference between inbound marketing and outbound marketing?

They are both marketing. Is inbound marketing really lovable?

8 Reasons Why You Will Love Inbound Marketing

With inbound marketing you are using marketing tactics that will earn the interest and attention of your buyer personas. Compared to outbound marketers that have to buy and / or beg their way in. By using inbound marketing, it provides you with a platform that allows you to effectively execute marketing tactics such as blogging, social media engagement, email marketing and on-page SEO; that will help your business get found, generate leads and grow your sales. Not only do you want to create marketing your visitors and leads love but also marketing that your company loves.

Inbound Marketing is 100% Quantifiable

You might be wondering if there is any connection between inbound marketing and results. The answer is yes; there definitely is a connection.

With outbound marketing you might have to spend anywhere from $1 million or more for an optimal TV commercial spot, and we're not even including the cost of creating those commercials. You might also want to consider the cost of placing an ad in a magazine which could range anywhere from $100 to $125, 000 based on the size, where the ad is placed and what magazine you want your ad featured in. Now that is a lot of money, you're spending, but are you actually generating any visitors or even customers from those advertisements? If can be hard to tell. However, with inbound marketing there is a mathematical connection between your inbound marketing efforts and your results.

Depending on the amount of work and effort you put into your inbound marketing campaign, you will see results that mirror those efforts. For example, if you only blog twice a month and rarely post and engage on social media, you probably won't gain a significant amount of traffic, compared to if you blogged consistently twice a day and actively engaged and interacted with your fans on social media everyday.

If your website traffic and leads aren't meeting your goals for the month, consider increasing your blog frequency. You also need to ensure that you content is inline with the goals and needs of your buyer personas.

Produces Results

The great part of your inbound marketing campaign is that you can continuously track and improve your efforts. It is important to note that you're not going to see results immediately. It may take any where from one month to 6 months or more to see a significant increase in your traffic and an improvement in the quality of leads. Every company wants to see an improvement in their results. That can only happen if you're regularly analyzing your data and make smart marketing decisions to improve the traffic and content your company is producing.

Once you know where your traffic is coming from, you can take advantage of that source of traffic. For example if a significant portion of your traffic is organic, this can tell you that your company has a significant search presence. You can also identify what keywords visitors are typing into search engines. Knowing what prospects are searching for will help you identify what type of content and information they're looking for. Take advantage of that knowledge and develop more targeted content.

Uses Marketing Automation

There is nothing better than using marketing software like HubSpot that allows you to automate your inbound marketing tactics. How many times have your forgotten to schedule or even send lead nurturing emails, let alone  forgetting to publish social media updates?

With HubSpot, you no longer have to worry about sending a message so many days after a lead downloads an Ebook. Once you've sent up your lead nurturing campaigns, the software will automatically enroll leads into specific workflows based on the conditions you've set.

Marketing automated tactics include:

• Lead nurturing

• Auto-responders

• Social media publishing

• Lead scoring

• List segmentation

How to Make Your Marketing Lovable

Inbound marketing is customer centric. You want to put your customers in control. When considering how lovable your inbound marketing is, look at the content your producing and what context it's in.

Content

The best way to grab the attention of your ideal prospect is to create content they will want to read. Before you even begin to develop content for your site, you need to identify who your buyer personas are.

Who are your customers? If you cannot answer this question, you won't know if you're educating the right target market and generating qualified leads.

If you haven't already, ask yourself ... what are your ideal customers and prospects biggest concerns, needs, problems, and interests? Do you know what type of content they prefer? Do you even know where you can reach them?  Those are some of the main questions you should be asking yourself to help create detailed buyer personas.

Content can include:

• Blogs

• Interactive tools

• Photos

• Infographics

• Videos

• Ebooks

• Presentations

Context

The context in which you're sending your marketing message is extremely important. You need to ensure that your content matches your customers needs. Don't think of your marketing as one size fits all. This never works. Your content should be personal and even personalized for each lead. You can create a more personalized experience for your visitors and leads by getting to know them and using the information they've provided to send segmented emails and to personalize sections of your site like call to actions and form fills.