Inbound Marketing In A Nutshell

By Douglas Hsu

Gone are the days when you want to advertise your products, you try to reach as many people as possible to find potential customers.

We live in the 21st century. We have jet planes, stem cell research and most importantly, for us marketers, we have the Google search engine.

Say hypothetically, I would like to sell my product, an industrial-grade photocopier.

This would provide high performance, but would be very expensive. Most probably, only large offices would need it.

Should I put up advertisements on buses to promote my photocopier?

What about cold calling numbers right out of the Yellow Pages to see if they’re interested?

Or broadcasting TV commercials for my photocopier during half time of the weekend’s football matches?

Probably not. It would not be cost-efficient. What are the odds of finding prospects looking for such large-sized equipment among so many consumers? It would be like finding a needle in a haystack.

The above mentioned marketing methods are known as outbound marketing, which is perfectly fine for consumer goods like soft drinks or food products, but not so much for a product like my photocopier with such a niche market.

Here’s where Google comes in.

If you were looking for an industrial-grade photocopier, where would you look? That’s right, you’d Google it. The odds are that you’d be led to a website selling the product that you want, and that’s how a buyer-seller relationship starts. This is Inbound Marketing*. It starts with the buyer. It has been proven to be extremely effective for generating leads for marketing large-ticket items for businesses in the U.S.

* Inbound marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves SEO, Social Media, blog and landing pages to generate sales leads. Closed-loop, content-based

software platforms, such as HubSpot, are totally integrated. Visitors can go from information searching to being converted into customers without leaving the marketing platform. Consult us for a FREE website assessment so we can tell you what it takes to make your website more 'inbound'!

Also read our other posts like Inbound Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing and 4 Simple Steps of Inbound Marketing