With regards to marketing, there are many ways you can proceed with your strategy. More often than not, you’ll be faced with two different paths to go down; inbound or outbound marketing.

Outbound marketing is the more traditional approach and centers on trying to grab an audience’s attention by using things such as print adverts, marketing emails, cold calls, etc. It’s all about your business going out of its way to try and find customers.

In years gone by, outbound marketing was the main concept that businesses lived by. However, consumers and markets have changed, paving the way for inbound marketing to take over.

Throughout this article, we will explain to you what inbound marketing is and why it is so effective in the modern business world. By consuming this information, you will have a greater understanding of the concept and will see why your business should adopt this approach.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

While outbound marketing focuses on going out of your way to try and grab people’s attention, inbound marketing is more about naturally attracting consumers to your business. To do this, there’s no emphasis on adverts or anything like that, it’s all formulated around content creation.

In theory, if your business provides great content on your website or through social media, people will be attracted to it. They’ll find it by their own means, and it will intrigue them and bring them closer to your business.

Examples of content include blog posts, instructional videos, guides, social media posts, podcasts, press releases, and so on. You put your content out there and ensure it offers something to consumers. It must either entertain, educate, or inform whoever engages with it. This is what lures them in, as they know they’re indulging in content that’s valuable to them.

Once you’ve reeled them in with your content, you can focus on generating leads through calls-to-action and landing pages. Get people to sign up for things when they engage with your content, then you have leads to try and convert into customers. It’s a very simple process, and it all starts with content creation.

Why Is Inbound Marketing Effective?

After seeing what inbound marketing entails, you’re probably eager to understand why it’s such an effective approach. Bearing that in mind, we’ve put together some key reasons that explain this for you:

Extremely Affordable

One of the brilliant things about inbound marketing is that you get more value for your money. With the outbound approach, you will pay a lot of money for adverts and other outbound marketing material, without being guaranteed of any results.

With the inbound approach, you spend a fraction of the price and have far more chance of engagement as you’re waiting for consumers to find you, rather than forcing your material down their throat. In essence, your marketing budget is shortened, and the chance of results is heightened.

Consumers Are Blocking Outbound Procedures

Inbound marketing is so effective because a lot of outbound procedures can be blocked by consumers. Think about it, we have ad blockers that completely get rid of any online advertisements for some users. There’s caller ID and number blocking features that allow consumers to prevent cold calls. We even have the rise in on-demand TV/movies and the ability to pause TV and fast forward through adverts, which makes TV advertising a lot less effective.

Consequently, businesses need to turn towards other approaches that people can’t block out, such as inbound marketing and content creation. You’re not forcibly trying to push something to consumers, so they can’t make attempts to block it from their view. Your content is out there, and people can find it whenever they want, however they like.

You Attract The Right Leads

The very nature of content creation means that the people that find your content are going to be interested in what it entails, which means they may be interested in your business. For example, imagine you’re a Chiropractor, and you write a blog post on the latest study on ankle mobility in young athletes. You’re now drawing in parents of athletes who may be interested in possible solutions, which means they’re interested in your services and will be interested in what you sell.

What this does is ensure your company is generating high-quality leads that are really easy to convert. If you’re naturally attracting people that already have an interested in things relating to your business, it’s not going to take much to convert them. Inbound marketing makes lead generation easier and helps boost your conversion rates.

It Encourages Brand Loyalty

With outbound methods, you don’t encourage any brand loyalty at all. An advert may appeal to someone, but it’s unlikely to make a consumer loyal to your brand. But, one of the reasons inbound marketing is so effective is that it does encourage loyalty.

By producing valuable content, you encourage people to keep coming back and consuming more blog posts or watching more of your instructional videos, etc. People start to go to your site whenever they have a question that needs answering and are looking for some info or entertainment. As a result, you keep bringing people back to more, which encourages them to be loyal to your brand as they relate to your content and enjoy it.

Easily Adaptable

The beauty of inbound marketing and content creation is that you can easily adapt your efforts. If there are things trending in your market, you can adapt your content approach to center around this trend. It can lead to more views of your content and give your site a real traffic spike.

The key thing is, you can do this without having to make any major changes or spending lots of money. You just notice a trend, produce content revolving around it, and you’re done. Compare this to outbound marketing, and you’d need to pull your old adverts and then pay for new ones to be created, then pay to publish them. All of this can be costly and requires loads of effort.

Inbound marketing is the modern approach and businesses should switch to it and place emphasis on content creation. In doing so, you provide more value to people reading your content, which will only serve to help increase leads, maximize conversions, and generate a lot of revenue.