“Inbound Marketing” is a catchy phrase amongst the business world nowadays and you have certainly heard about it already. But, what is Inbound Marketing? Keep Reading and you will find out.

How and where it all started?

When talking about Inbound Marketing, we must go back a few years because, as the big Marketing Guru, Peter Drucker says, the development of Inbound Marketing strategies have been with us for very long, being able to set the example of Seth Godin´s Permission Marketing, back in 1999 as the starting point. In his theory, you could see that what we are looking at started in parallel with Digital Marketing and it relates consumer with advertising.

Now that we have an updated vision of the concept and it´s use, we can set the US as the place where it was born, or actually, reborn. There is no specific date, but we know that it became popular in 2009, after the launch of the famous book “Inbound Marketing: found using Google, social media and blogs.” by authors Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah.

Even if it is not the real origin of the Inbound Marketing, it was very important due to the content started being spread around the globe with huge acceptance. Before this, many entrepreneurs already had the vision but were not conscious of its use. In these past few years, this term gained much space and nowadays almost every company understand its importance towards growth.

What it is and how it works?

It literally translates to “Entry Marketing”, some people also call it “Attraction Marketing”. The name itself indicates one of the main characteristics about a discipline that attracts customers. This means that the customer searches for the company because he feels attracted to it. On the other hand, traditional “Outbound” Marketing, in which the company went out looking for customers. Of course, in order for the customer to feel such attraction, he must have been exposed to a certain level of advertising towards your brand, he must find in it a way for him or her to satisfy a necessity.

The strategy behind this vision of Marketing focus its efforts in earning interest from potential customers, through the exact opposite of what traditional marketing said. It attracts people to your brand, generating contact with them, understanding what they are looking for and their needs, offering in return exactly that, in order to enchant the customer.

In order to achieve this, the main tactic is to reach people through content. Create quality content aimed at a certain segment or group of people you previously defined as your core. This means you won’t be wasting time preparing expensive marketing campaigns towards a wide group of potential (or not really) customers. Set your audience, know their needs and aim for them with specialized content. By attracting the right kind of traffic, your chances of a better conversion rate to turn those people into leads are higher and they increase your chances of closing a sale. In other words, Inbound Marketing do not insist on selling a product the brand wants you to sell, but it defines the audience and shows them a product they need to have. It is not about the classic company selling whatever they want, but rather about the customers themselves letting know what their needs are, so interested companies could target that market with a certain product. This is why the customer will get to buy due to attraction, because they will feel identified with your brand.

What are the benefits?

Inbound Marketing have changed perspectives and the way business strategy Works, by understanding how it Works, companies start understanding Marketing as a true investment and not as a cost. For sure, the benefits are many. Let’s see the main ones:

1- Reach towards the right audience

This is one of the main benefits, because this guarantees the brand is investing time and money on the right people for whatever product they have to offer.

2- Tighten brand-customer relationships

This could already be seen on the name of the technique, because the more effort on attracting customers through a relationship of trust instead of attracting customers basically by pushing them. This way, people in the segment will be much more likely to listen to your tips and suggestions, besides tightening the commercial relationship on a daily basis.

3- Increase your power of persuasion

Because the brand now deals with the people previously interested on your product, they receive the content they need in order to build some trust or safety net around the brands’ name. This turns into the customer being easier to persuade and convince of an idea or the purchase of a new product.

4- Shorter sale cycle

Clearly, the sale cycle is rather short since you won’t be wasting time. You will develop techniques for a certain audience, offering a certain product and applying different models that would work for it. In other words, there will not be room for meaningless searches nor analysis, because it will be previously verified; this lessens the chances of your business strategy being incorrect.

5- Decrease of costs

Investment towards acquisition will be significantly less, besides decreasing unnecessary costs you might come upon through other models, or by not having quality content. This way, you will avoid wasting resources, being able to use them at a later stage on the sales process.

6- Better control and reporting

Inbound Marketing allows the company to have an exact control in real time of the results. Due to the tools and metrics allowing you to do so, all the time, by applying the techniques. It is possible to know the amount of clicks, prints, registrations and sales.

Are you already aware of the advantages that Inbound Marketing brings? No doubt it is an excellent way of reaching the right quantity and quality of audience. So, what is inbound marketing? You already have the information to start.

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