Inbound Marketing: What’s Your Strategy?
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Thu, Sep 22, 2011
Conventional outbound marketing is costly and wasteful. What you’re doing is paying for advert impressions and for interrupting someone else’s activity. You pay for everything: ad space, airtime, printing of hard media, PPC impressions etc. So outbound marketing is all about spending. The more you spend, the more you’re supposed to increase your market share. But we know this isn’t exactly the fair way to gain a market share, and certainly not for smaller businesses with smaller budgets.
Luckily, there is an easier way. Inbound marketing is the process of using high quality content, SEO and social media to gain ground on competitors. And it really works. Inbound marketing allows businesses to grow faster and smarter by outthinking the competition, not outspending them. But the first thing you need is a plan.
So what’s your plan?
Let’s start from the beginning. Everyone needs a strategy. Below are our most valuable points for getting started in inbound marketing:
A: Clearly define and differentiate your brand from your competitors.
B: Design, plan out and generate a highly content-driven website.
C: Make sure to consider the impact of your inbound marketing strategy on all audiences (e.g. peers, competitors, employees, job candidates, vendors, PR media, prospects and customers).
C: Be sure to establish measurable & meaningful campaign objectives that are designed to achieve the primary goals of generating leads and building loyalty.
D: Build an integrated campaign fueled by core inbound marketing strategies. These can include search marketing, content marketing, public relations, and social media.
E: Set your budgets, but make them dynamic. They should be flexible so that they can be changed based on campaign performance.
F: What’s your timeline? Define it, and put your goals on it.
G: Use metrics and measuring devices to gauge performance.
If your business needs guidance on developing an inbound marketing strategy, SiliconCloud can help. Contact us today.
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