What is inbound marketing? It refers to the type of marketing that brings customers in as they become ready to be brought in. This is unlike original advertising that tends to interrupt the daily activities of the customers. This refers to advertisements such as pop-ups, banners, commercials, etc. On the other hand, inbound advertisements are things such as SEO and PPC. Your target audience will find you when they are ready to buy.
Some people have excluded all other advertisements other than inbound, due to the sheer fact that other advertisements were not targeting properly and were merely interrupting the activity currently being performed by the customer. However, somewhere in this mix of deciding the qualities of inbound marketing, PPC seemed to become lost among some. Yet, PPC is closer to organic search than it is to traditional advertising. PPC is context-driven.
The point is that the customer is coming to you, even if you have to pay per click or not. Free clicks have their costs too though, with all of the work and time it takes to remain on the first page and stay relevant. Inbound marketing is not defined by the amount of money being spent, but rather by the direction of the flow.
Inbound marketing is about creating and sharing contest across the globe. By creating quality content for the targeted customers, it keeps bringing these customers back for more every time.
It is all centralized to the idea of being in the right place at the right time. By staying true to this idea in the world of marketing, companies can make their marketing helpful and relevant to its customers.
The major themes of inbound advertising are content creation, lifecycle marketing, personalization, multi-channel, and integration.
Now, onto the four marketing actions of inbound marketing: attract, convert, close, and delight. Attracting the customers that you specifically want to find your page will produce better leads for your company and happier customers. Things to help attracting can be blogging, social media, keywords, and pages. Once you get visitors to your site, you need to convert them into leads. Now it is time to close. You need to take these leads and turn them into customers. Then finally, don’t forget to keep delighting them, because even though you already have their service, that doesn’t mean you can forget about them.