Every day, businesses are vying for the online attention of potential customers. The slow-loading video ads that play before an interesting news segment, the blockable but intrusive pop-up ad, the Facebook sidebar ad with a creepy connection to a life event: these all are the result of outbound marketing. They cost businesses thousands of dollars to develop, not to mention purchasing space to display. And more than anything, they only manage to annoy the hundreds and hundreds who are subjected to them.
What if your business was found by people who are actually looking for its services rather than wasting time and money on being visible to those who will only ignore it? To achieve this type of relevance and effect involves the field of inbound marketing. Inbound marketing helps you promote your products to people who already need them through the various services of an inbound marketing agency.
An inbound marketing agency will help your business direct precious marketing funds towards interested customers. It gives you the tools to reach out to people already interested in your products and win their loyalty. By focusing on people who actually need the services you offer, your business will have a return on investment (ROI) in marketing.
How does an inbound marketing agency achieve this? One of the initial steps they will take is to tailor your company’s web presence for search engine optimizations, or SEO, which may involve recoding your site or changing the way content is displayed. This increases the online visibility of your website among others for when potential customers search for the services you offer. The various ways an inbound marketing agency aids you in utilizing SEO will even serve to connect people who do not understand what they are looking for with a business, like yours, that offers it.
This is where a potential customer can become an actual customer: an inbound marketing agency will help you inform site visitors about the products you offer and connect them to the ones they need. Even a monthly blogpost increases site traffic by as much as 50% for a small business. If a visitor finds helpful information on your blog or a free eBook relevant to their search, you have just made a potential customer very happy. Not only are they likely to avail themselves of your company’s services, they are likely to share with others about your company.
But how does an inbound marketing agency bring you actual customers? To give one example, perhaps that blogpost was really helpful and the customer wants more information. If they have to sign up for informative emails (perhaps sending the latest blogpost directly to their inbox with other content about special offers) in order to get a free eBook that the inbound marketing agency helped you create, there is now a concrete lead on which to follow up.
Or, perhaps you direct them to “like” your page on Facebook before they can download that eBook. This gives them the choice to receive content from you when they are engaged with social media and it is far more effective than creepy sidebars. Even better, via social media, their friends will also now know about you. This gives you “earned media”, something “paid media” cannot offer: the forum for a happy customer to share about a service that you have done well.
The other critical thing offered by an inbound marketing agency is the ability to sift through data regarding site visitors: how long do they stay on your site? Where do they spend that time? What percentage are transformed into actual customers? What percentage sign up for emails? These data sets are invaluable when it comes to strengthening your online presence and marketing ROI.
If your company is looking to reach potential customers with relevant information and increase the likelihood of selecting you over your competitors, not to mention relay to their friends the positive experience they have had with you, strongly consider the services of an inbound marketing agency.
