If you’ve never seen inbound marketing really work in action, I can understand your disbelief. In comparison to traditional outbound marketing and the active process of finding customers, it is difficult to wrap your head around the idea that letting prospects come to you can pay off in the long run.
When we think about marketing, we think billboards, magazine spreads, TV advertisements etc. The common factor to all of these? They are outbound techniques. In comparison, Inbound tools such as social media and the internet has revolutionised the way prospects consume content and choose where they buy from. They can now easily look for solutions to their problems - that hopefully company could solve!
Does Outbound Marketing Work Anymore?
How many TV advertisements have you seen lately that have made you run straight to the shops and buy the highlighted product? How many billboards have convinced you to part with some cash? Despite billboards being difficult to ignore and TV jingles being alarmingly catchy, these don’t always inspire action and trust from their consumers.
Of course, along with direct mail and email marketing, these do have a subliminal effect. You may not immediately buy the product or service, but the repeated exposure might help you to remember a brand within the long run. However, as more ways become available to advertise to your target audience, people are so used to the exposure that they tend to tune obvious advertisements out. This article from Forbes puts it very bluntly: ‘people don’t like ads’.
So instead of, ‘Does Inbound Marketing Really Work?’, the question you should be asking is, ‘Why should a prospect choose my company over others available in my industry?’.
That’s where inbound marketing comes in.
How Inbound Marketing REALLY Works:
Inbound Marketing has the advantage of originating in the mind of the customer. Once they realise they need something, they are likely to investigate their problem, research ways to resolve it, before finally buying the product that can become the solution.
What I am describing here is the buyers journey.
How to Combat the Awareness Stage
The first thing a consumer is going to do is use a search engine. Searching key-words relating to their problem is a sure-fire way to start their researching journey. That’s why, if you want to use inbound marketing to improve the top of the funnel, you need to optimize all sources of visitors. This includes making sure your website search is optimized, leveraging social media for new visitors, and identifying other websites for inbound links - this will elevate your sites rankings and drive new visitors to your website. If any of these terms are foreign to you, use our inbound marketing dictionary to find out more.
When these tactics are done coordination with each other they should generate the desired results. However, Inbound Marketing’s authenticity is often questioned because these results are produced over time as opposed to short term gains. Monthly visits to your website will not shoot up automatically as soon as these tactics are implemented, they will slowly improve at approximately 10% to 20% month-over-month. This might not seem like much, but over the course of a year these small improvements produce big results, typically improving the numbers by 250% to 500%. This means a site that was generating 2,000 visits a month is now seeing 6,000 to 8,000 visits, while a site with 200 visits a month now receives 600 to 1,000 visits. So, stick with it as the results are worth it in the long run!
How to Combat the Consideration Stage
Once the buyer has narrowed down their choice and given a name to their problem, they will become committed to researching possible solutions. This is the stage where they will look for more comprehensive information to see if your company is a viable source to purchase from. To align yourself with this stage it is important you have content to facilitate the problem solving of your prospects. Make sure your webpages have compelling messaging alongside the opportunity to download content like e-books, whitepapers, videos and tip guides. This way your visitors will want more and by including long forms on your site, convert from visitors to leads at a very high rate.
In short, when you understand the buyers journey of your prospects and offer them the correct downloadable educational content to answer their questions, your website will transform from an online brochure to a lead generation machine!
How to combat the decision stage
If you have effectively and successfully guided your buyers through the awareness and consideration stages of their journeys, convincing them to consider your solution as the one to satisfy them should be easy! You’ve just got to close the deal.
During this stage, the focus should validate why your product or solution is worth purchasing over others. Consider how buyers evaluate each offering, their expectations, and the potential preparations they need to make before purchase. To align yourself with this stage, you could offer vendor comparisons, case studies, trial downloads or even live demos.
Inbound Marketing: Myth or Proven Methodology?
With an inbound marketing effort, a wide multiplicity of other metrics can improve over time. Social media audience reach is one of the most significant, but others include blog subscribers, keyword rankings, MozRank (quality and popularity of pages), bounce rate and email performance data.
It’s hard to dispute numeric data. Data either goes up, down, or remains stable. What powers those variations could be debated, but inbound marketing has such a cause-and-effect impact on numbers that it’s difficult to identify other variables that might be impacting and correlating to performance.
If you’ve never seen improvements like this or could deliver these types of quantitative gains, then it is easy to understand why one could question the validity of inbound marketing. However, just because it’s a method that is difficult to initially prove, doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. I hope I’ve managed to convince you otherwise, and instead of thinking it doesn’t work, try spending more time investigating others success with inbound marketing and consider how you could replicate their strategy.
If you would like to discuss further how inbound marketing could work for your company, please don’t hesitate to get in touch for a free consultation.