Inbound Marketing - In a nutshell

Inbound marketing - In a nutshell For many years marketeers have focused on outbound marketing. Your message is pushed out attempting to buy people's attention. Think Radio, Think Magazine Ads, Think TV. With Inbound Marketing the focus switches to 'earnt' attention. By providing your prospects with something of value they give you permission to keep marketing to them. For example, giving away advice in a blog article or whitepaper which your prospect finds via Google is a good form of Inbound Marketing. If you're lucky, they subscribe to your blog feed and in turn give you permission to market to them in the future. This is the first step. True inbound companies work on converting these prospects into customers, taking them on a journey down a purchasing funnel. This is called lead nurturing. This consists of email auto-responders; automated emails which give your prospect useful information, help & advice through the buyer funnel, Conversion optimisation; offering up different formats of the same page on your website to find out which convert more regularly. and even dynamic content; if I know you've downloaded a document from my site before, I might put a personal message for you next time you return -- you're now marketing to an audience of one. The first step to inbound marketing is to work out your buyer personas. In my business, one of our personas is Bob. Bob is the managing director of a successful business turning over more than a million pounds a year. He built the business from scratch and is fascinated by marketing because he recognises that it's the route to take his business to the next level. He's a passionate person who knows what he wants and looks to employ the best people for the job. He doesn't try and drive people down on price because he appreciates quality. Now, when we create our marketing material we think of Bob. Would this blog article be of interest to him, would this letter we're sending out get through his PA? Is this whitepaper something he's likely to print and take home to read? With Inbound marketing, your focus becomes more defined and less time is wasted trying to appeal to all.