Inbound marketing. Sounds like just another one of those marketing buzzwords. Except it isn't.
If there's one thing every company should be using in their promotional strategy, it's inbound marketing.
We like to define inbound marketing as the creation of content that provides value to an audience. Inbound marketing is designed to attract your desired audience and keep them returning to your channels. This is imperative for the long-term success of your business. In the context of social media, for example, you want your target audience to follow your Instagram page and to continue following long term. Keeping your target audience within arm’s reach is key if you want to be able to keep your promotion budget to a minimum. Returning to our social media example, having a large number of followers on Instagram essentially gives you a significant group of your target audience at your disposal to advertise your products to for little to no-cost, at any time you want to (assuming your followers are actually a part of your target audience). By using inbound marketing techniques, you'll be able to do just that.
Inbound marketing can be broken down into 3 main categories. We like to call them the 3 E's. They are:
Educating is exactly how it sounds. You can teach your customers about a certain subject, preferably something related to your product. The value offered from this content comes from the knowledge you're spreading to your audience. Examples of this include:
Entertaining your audience pertains to creating content or marketing initiatives that your target audience finds engaging. The value offered from this content comes from the enjoyment your audience gains from consuming your content. Examples of this include:
Our events category differs a bit from educating and entertaining. Rather than actually pertaining to content, events focus more on marketing initiatives organized by the brand. Events provide value through physical means, such as contests for your product, or even through the means of the other two E's. Examples of this include:
The entire point of inbound marketing is to create content that is of value to your audience, and NOT DIRECTLY selling your audience on a product or service. Explicitly promoting your product in inbound marketing is a huge no-no because it defeats the whole purpose. Inbound marketing is meant to only put the audience first, and to give them content or value that they'll actually appreciate, not content that is selling to them. If you choose to subtly place your product in the inbound marketing content, you must really find the right balance to achieve the perfect amount of subtlety.
When looking around at many different company social media pages, advertising channels, etc., you often see people using their channels for straight-forward promotion, or even promoting their promotion to reach as many people as possible. If you're advertising to anyone you see, you're essentially an old man yelling at the clouds, and wasting a ton of money, too. Sure, if you have a huge marketing budget, you can go that route, but your money could be best spent elsewhere. More importantly, you don't actually know if you're truly reaching your target audience. Not only will inbound marketing be more cost effective, but it lets your audience come to you.
If you want to learn more about inbound marketing and how to implement it into your promotional strategy, stay tuned for the remainder of our inbound marketing series, which will be coming out soon!
