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8 Compelling Reasons Why You Need Inbound Marketing

Monday 20 July 2015

11 minute read

By Sarah Burns

Over recent years, inbound marketing has become a very popular concept for businesses across the pond and, now, right here in Blighty too. 

The question remains, however, "Why do I need inbound marketing?", despite the increased awareness and promotion of such services.

Inbound marketing is the process of attracting strangers to you, rather than outbound marketing which involves you interrupting them and, for want of a better term, forcing your company into their lives.

With the process involving a high amount of content marketing and automation, it is designed to make customers more responsive to your messaging and, in turn, more open to your products and services. 

Of course, there is also an obvious advantage in using automation, that you can set up workflows and scheduled blog content, email campaigns and social messaging, to appear engaging but easing your workload, with lots of planning and preparation.

8 Compelling Reasons Why You Need Inbound Marketing

1. It structures your content offering

Inbound marketing centres around a content strategy. Everything should be planned and have a clear goal for what your visitors should gain from your content and what they should do next. 

Inbound marketing structures your content and enables you to refine your processes, to help guide visitors into becoming leads and then nurturing them in customers/ A strategy will increase your odds of gaining more leads, because your content is suited to buyer personas.

Buyer personas are representations of your perfect customer and reveal pain points, technology preferences, business demographics and they reasons that a potential customer may be put off buying from you (and how you can challenge that).

2. Inbound loves content and the people love content

Content, content, content! People love to read content, especially online, for product descriptions, user reviews and so much more. Being able to produce a social media strategy and content marketing strategy enables you to share your thought leadership and the rave feedback your products and services have received. 

When someone Google's keywords relating to your company and they find your blog post on the subject and it helps them, they're already satisfied before you've personally communicated with them. In the inbound age, they may never actually communicate with you, depending on your business and industry. 

3. Inbound doesn't intrude or interrupt

Inbound is heavily focused on having brain power, rather than lots of money. In a previous lifetime, we could throw money at outbound methods - billboards, radio advertising etc - and just hope for the best, with little knowledge of if it worked and if it did, how well it worked. 

Inbound works in a different way. It is there to be found by the people who are looking for it, rather than interrupting everybody. It is a much more wholesome way of making leads aware of your business and services and having them naturally engage with you, rather than the other way - making for a much more positive user / customer experience. 

4. Inbound equals content and content equals a higher SEO ranking

Creating more blog posts, means more indexed pages, which helps to increase your SEO ranking. Having content such as blog posts that is then shared and redistributed on yours and others' social media pages, adds to your search ranking growth. Being able to accurately tag your content and add image tags, can also boost the searchability of your different website and blog pages, increasing visits to your site by the exact people you want - your buyer personas! 

Read this Thrive blog for help on completing SEO basics, when blogging.

5. People like free stuff, so attract them with inbound

It's a fact that everyone loves a freebie (Just check out #FreebieFriday on Twitter to find out!), so inbound works really well, because you offer leads free content and resources, which they love! Of course, it's not quite free, as they are offering certain details about themselves in return. Typically it is business related details, such as industry, job title, name, email address, company name, so you can improve on your buyer personas and, also, build a content strategy that suits them and ensures they still have appreciation for you. Maybe, one day, they will become a paying customer! 

The advantage is it only takes up time and once it is all automated in a full inbound structure, there is a lot less time being used.

Find out more about inbound marketing software and how we can help you with data capture and automation by emailing hello@thriveability.co.uk

6. It's a cost effective, trust building solution

Although there is a lot of time put into implementing a full scale inbound strategy, at the start of the process, it eventually ends up with very little input from you - thanks to automation. Ultimately, it saves considerable money, as all of your marketing (more or less) is in one place rather than across many different platforms and / or formats. 

There also is a great reward in how you are building real trust in your product and company, for your customers, through content and personalised marketing. You can't put a price on the lead nurturing process that comes with implementing a full scale inbound strategy! 

7. It's a long term process, with long term results

Inbound requires a lot of strategy and patience, to begin with. We're always completely transparent that it is not a one night stand, but a long term relationship and you shouldn't expect miracles instantly. Inbound provides a solid long term structure for your marketing and sales teams, clarifying your aims and target audience, all the while building a huge collateral of resource, in terms of downloadable ebooks, blog posts and social media statuses. 

Those companies with realistic expectations can really thrive with an inbound marketing strategy in place.

8. Organic is better than paid - always!

Inbound improves your search visibility, we've covered that with #5, but let's just remind ourselves of the natural benefits of organic search results...

Website visitors that find you, rather than being interrupted by you - paid advertising etc - are naturally keener to stick on your web pages longer (improving bounce rates), as well as actually look around your website and find out more about you. If your content is strong and answers your visitors questions, then they are more inclined to already be buyer personas (they found you, because you're offering solutions to their pain points) and more likely to engage with you by downloading contact or directly contacting you!

Overall, organic is more cost-effective, stronger at building relationships and offers increased lead generation opportunities.

Find out why it's crucial to choose a UK HubSpot Partner Agency to help you implement inbound/HubSpot at your company

If you're looking to embark on a website build project, whether it's completely from scratch or a site refresh, our ebook will give you the knowledge to make your project as stress-free as possible.

The Website Design Handbook for Businesses

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