5 Reasons Why Inbound Marketing is Key to Your Marketing Strategy
You’ve most likely heard about inbound marketing, and how it’s crucial to your marketing strategy. However, do you understand the compelling reasons? Are you dragging your feet on joining the recent phenomenon called Inbound Marketing? If so, you should check out why you cannot ignore this marketing strategy any longer. Creating trust in your brand and providing fun, educational content for your customers are the well-known reasons inbound marketing is a must for your business. However, there are other priorities with inbound that you may not have considered.
Before we dive into that, let’s briefly discuss what inbound marketing is.
Definition of Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy where customers interact with you via blogs, search engine results, social media, content, etc. The main reason inbound marketing is as effective as it is is because it is non-intrusive and customers come to you. There is a catch, however: You have to create what customers want or are searching for, and it has to be quality content too.
Why Inbound Marketing is Essential
So what makes inbound marketing so critical? Here are five reasons why.
- More and more consumers are using ad blockers: People hate ads, and will go to great lengths to avoid them or fail to even notice them. They’ll even pay not to see them too — think of Hulu’s ad-free subscription option. And when it comes to online, consumers have a way to block ads completely using ad blockers.
Companies that rely on ads as their main sources of revenue are feeling the effects of this. One company even sent out a plea to its readers asking them not to block ads for that very reason. Time will tell if the company survives without this critical piece of revenue.
More and more companies are realizing ads are worthless, and are turning to inbound marketing to reach their customers.
- Social media algorithms give people the content they want: People have become ‘brandists” enjoying, consuming and evangelizing brands. Just look at the Apple/Android divide; People are passionate about their brands and you have heard this phone platform debate far and wide. In order to recruit your own “brandists”, you have to give them something they want. Consumers rely on their Facebook and Twitter feeds to see what’s going on in the world, and Facebook and Twitter’s algorithms cater to that. Breaking into that cycle can be difficult, but if you create fun, education blogs and articles that people like, it’ll show up in their feeds. You don’t just have to post your own stuff either. Think of your business page as a hub for photos, videos, memes and other content for your product topic. If you sell makeup for example, you can post memes about it that people will like and share, and ultimately increase your chances of showing up in the dashboards.
For example, this meme from PopSugar.
- Facebook is where most people consume content. There should be saying: “You live or die by Facebook.” Because it’s true. Almost 75% of adults use Facebook, with most logging in more than once a day. That increases your chances of having your content being seen dramatically compared to other social media websites.
How you post content on Facebook matters, too. Posts with images are seen 2.3 times more than posts without. Investing in some visual marketing can help increase your chances of someone clicking on your article and going to your website.
- People want content, and they’re not getting it: Consumers want more content, especially blogs — 29% to be exact. Companies that invest in blogs found that if they post 16 or more blogs a month received 3.5 times as much traffic compared to someone only post 4 times a month. The demand is out there, and if you can meet it, you’ll find your customers are eager for it.
- Search engine rankings still matter: Unless you’re in the eCommerce business, Google rankings matter. (Otherwise, it’s Amazon for eCommerce.) Consumers who go through a search engine for a product are much closer to the purchase stage than those who see you content passively through Facebook. Around 80% of consumers actually do research through search engines before purchasing a product.
Knowing that, is your content one of the first things people see? Sure, you could purchase a Google Ad to work your way to the top, but as we stated before, people don’t like ads. Instead, if you invest in the time to create quality content with good SEO, you can find yourself rising to the top and increasing your chances of being seen.
Also, it needs to be mobile friendly. Not only are more and more people using mobile phones, but Google prioritizes websites that are mobile-friendly.
How is inbound marketing key to your marketing strategy? Let us know in the comments.