Any Business Can Achieve Great ROI & Sales Figures Using Inbound Marketing

Successful marketing campaigns can be the lifeblood of any business. If you're concerned about sales and revenue growth figures resulting from your typical marketing campaigns, maybe it's time to move to a different approach? Traditional outbound marketing is seen as a little "old hat" in some quarters nowadays, perhaps it's time your business considered the benefits of inbound marketing instead?

Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing relies upon:

• one way communication!
• the business contacting potential customers via print/TV/radio/banner advertising, cold calling, purchasing mailing lists, etc

This type of marketing does not provide much, or even any, value to potential customers or members of the public and does not seek to entertain or educate consumers. Outbound marketing has been on the decline for some time, due to consumers becoming more aware and having greater control over the types of information they receive or assimilate. Statistics show that over 80 percent of consumers between the ages of 24 and 34 have quit using favoured websites due to intrusive site advertising, almost 90 percent of consumers skip TV adverts and over 40 percent of direct mail does not even get opened. Inbound marketing is educational and does provide great value to consumers.

Inbound Marketing

In contrast to outbound marketing, the inbound format is far more valuable to consumers as it relies on earning interest and educating, in the following ways:

• two way communication!
• interactive
• customers contact the business, as they acquire your details via search engines, social media and referrals
• it is valuable to consumers and potential customers

In contrast to outbound marketing, statistics have shown that an average company that maintains an active blog site generates over 50 percent more website visits, almost double the number of inbound links to the company site, around 125 percent more sales leads and over 400 percent indexed pages on popular search engines.

Inbound marketing seeks to entertain and educate consumers, leading to sales and revenue increases.

It has been noted that inbound marketing is a way for any company to "earn" a way into a consumer's buying attention by way of publishing useful and relevant information on the Internet. Inbound marketing is a simple way of communicating to potential customers by way of the following methodology:

• Attract
• Convert
• Close
• Delight

The initial "attract" stage of inbound marketing relies upon drawing potential customers into any business by way of business blogs, keywords and social publishing. The business issues valuable and educational information on blogs, using the best and most searched keywords and terms to attract consumers to the business website.

With the "convert" mode, your business turns interested readers into potential customers via calls to action (CTA), interactive forms and website landing pages.

In the "close" stage of the process customers are maintained and return to your business via active customer relationship management (CRM), email and workflows.

When it comes to "delight", your new customers are maintained in constant state of happiness with your business via regular surveys, smart content which continually appears on your blog and website and social monitoring.