There was a time when you could maintain your sales with the help of traditional marketing on TV channels,radios,and billboards. However, the time has changed, and now people prefer using the internet more than watching TV. Therefore traditional marketing became less effective. Today, if you are looking for ways to increase your sales, then you should surely adopt inbound marketing techniques.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is being in the right place at the right time. There are four primary inbound marketing techniques which you can use for your business
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
- Email Marketing
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a process of creating and distributing unique, valuable and relevant content to attract a specific target audience. There are various types of content businesses can create like blogs, videos, guides, product descriptions and many more.
Are you still wondering why people would read a 1000 words article rather than watch a three-minute TV commercial before purchasing a product? It’s all because of the rising competition. I do not deny the fact that TV ads generate sales, but not as much as they used to. On the other hand, content marketing is more effective because consumers can learn much more about the product and differentiate it from its substitutes.
If you compare content marketing techniques with the traditional ones like TV commercials and Newspaper ads, you’ll witness a significant difference in the cost associated with both strategies. For example, Fox charged $5 million for a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl 2017 (Sports Illustrated). I’m pretty sure you’ll never need to spend that much money with content marketing even if you work for the full year.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a strategy in which business owners use various social networks to promote products and their brand. This marketing technique involves posting and sharing images, videos, updates and other content on social platforms to generate traffic on a website. The best part about using social media marketing for your business is that sometimes you don’t even have to spend a penny. On the other hand, if you have a reasonable marketing budget, you can always run paid ads on these networks for faster and better results. Major social networks you can use are;
- Google+
- YouTube
- Snapchat
For example,Facebook has more than 2 billion users,which means you can easily find a significant number of people that you can target for your products. In addition, you can also initiate this marketing strategy within your comfort zone while sitting home.Or, you can simply hire a team of experts to look after your business’s social accounts.
Search Engine Optimization
If you want people to know about your business and products, then being listed with a good ranking on Google, Baidu, Bing,and Yahoo is necessary. Google accounts for over 76% of all global desktop search traffic, followed by Bing at 8%, Baidu at 7.5% and Yahoo at 7% (Net Market Share, 2016). The process of improving your ranking is called search engine optimization (SEO).
Every time you publish or upload something new on your website, web crawlers go through your page and analyze the content on it. After that, according to the quality and information available on that particular page, it gets indexed by search engines. In addition, you’ll receive a rank according to the keywords you use on the page. Remember, the right choice of keywords and the best content can easily help you end up with a good rank. To maintain your ranking, you should update the page and make a few changes every once in a while.
However, there are specific rules that you need to follow, or else your page may never even get indexed. This strategy is excellent in generating organic traffic to your website.
Email Marketing
Though this marketing technique is considered old school, if we compare it with other inbound tactics, the results are still astonishing. Email marketing is the process of sending commercial emails to your potential prospects. You can quickly build your email list by asking for Ids every time someone checks out. Or you can add a ‘subscribe now’button at various places on your website to convince your audience to sign up for your emails and newsletters.
You can also purchase email lists from many providers. However, it’s a risky trade as not all email IDs on the list are active or authentic. On the other hand, if you send random emails and don’t find your readability score increasing, you’ll eventually fall under the radar of your local ISP.
According to Statista, email users will rise to 4.1 billion users by 2021. That’s almost double the number of Facebook users! This fact clearly indicates that you have more chances of reaching out to your potential customers with the help of promotional emails.
However, the reason many companies have stopped or reduced their efforts in this strategy is due to various cyber threats. Over the years, many hackers have used emails as a passage of getting into your system. In addition, many spammers use this technique to lure you into their traps simply. That’s why many experts advise email users to be careful before opening emails.
To tackle specific cyber threats, ISPs have also shown efforts in stopping spam emails from reaching your inbox. Whenever they feel suspicious about a sender or simply catch a spammer, they blacklist their IP. Which means, all their emails will always land in receiver’s spam folder.
Wrap Up
A significant objective businesses work on is to lower their expenses and earn maximum profit. If organizations continue traditional marketing then eventually the expenses will never come down. On the other hand, inbound marketing has proven to generate sales at a much lower cost per transaction. Not only that, but you’ll also experience a rise in your revenue. It’s entirely your choice which marketing strategy you prefer,but as time is passing by and technological development on the verge to takeover everything, there will undoubtedly be a day when inbound marketing completely overlaps traditional methods in every industry around the world. – Make your move before its too late!
