Inbound Marketing - The Changing Trend
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Wed, Dec 22, 2010
Marketing is changing
Marketing is a catching, and dynamic, phenomenon. We all understand that traditional marketing is going strongly these days. Every organization develops its sales pitch through the use of the conventional four P’s or the marketing mix. Advertising, PR and other promotional activities dominate our eyes and minds. Every organization is running for the best TV spot and the most effective billboard placement to ensure higher sales. But what happens when an uninterested customer flips the channel without bothering to witness the complete ad? What happens when the customer is not bothered enough to even glance at the billboard or the press release? At this point, the most effective marketing mix also fails if it does not tap the customer right in the mind. Hence, comes inbound marketing.
So what is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketingis a strategy that pulls the interested customers towards the products themselves. It works on the principle that an interested customer will find his/her way to that product on his/her own.
Inbound Marketing Advantages
Inbound marketing holds a great many advantages over the traditional marketing strategies. Firstly, inbound marketing targets the exact key audience. Firms create information hubs and interested customers access these through search engines.
Secondly, inbound marketing is interruption-free. Since people work their way towards the product themselves, they have all their concentration on the websites or blog-posts. Further, their own interests leave behind all ways of interruption like caller ID and spam filters.
Thirdly, inbound marketing is viral, i.e. once a person gets to know of the product and its benefits, he/she will spread the word around. But we can say that this is the same as word-of-mouth marketing. However, inbound marketing takes this conventional word-of-mouth technique to extreme levels. As soon as any content is uploaded on the website, internet takes it all over the word in nanoseconds. Thus, you could be reaching a zillion customers in a single second.
It is definitely not feasible to ignore traditional marketing; but it is important to adopt this new method of marketing. Develop a strategy enveloping traditional and inbound marketing and you will have immediate success and recognition.