Feet Up Friday: What Is Inbound Marketing?

Below is the transcribed version of the video.

Hello everybody welcome to Feet Up Friday, I am your host Brendan Gilbert. This week I want to talk about inbound marketing. So if you've heard of inbound marketing you might have a few questions like: How can it help my business? Can it show me an ROI? These are some of the biggest questions we get from business owners and marketing professionals. And we hope to answer them below.

There are four basic fundamentals to the inbound marketing methodology which are:

• Attract - Attract visitors to site.
• Convert - Convert visitors to leads.
• Close - Close leads into customers.
• Delight - Delight customers, they're your best promoters.

If you happened to Google what is inbound marketing, or something similar, you should stick around. We're going to go over the inbound marketing fundamentals in more detail. However, before we dive deeper into that arena I want to talk briefly about the contrast to inbound marketing which is outbound marketing.

Outbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is different from outbound marketing in a way that it doesn't interrupt the consumers experience like outbound marketing does. Outbound marketing consists of:

• Radio
• Television
• Direct mail
• Traditional advertising

These tactics generally interrupt the consumer's experience. So for example, whenever you use Facebook you have interruptions to your experience from advertisements in your news feed. Or when you're watching television your favorite shows are interrupted by advertisements which, conveniently, are a great opportunity to make some popcorn or use the bathroom.

Inbound Marketing

The inbound marketing method is different. It does not interrupt you and its not begging for your attention like traditional marketing tactics. It's actually meant to attract visitors to your site by providing them with solutions to problems or questions that they want to find. It is designed to invite visitors versus forcing visitors.

Attract

For kicks, lets say you're a food service provider and you want to provide delivery service to new restaurants that have not found a provider yet. Using inbound marketing you are going to attract people who need food delivered on a weekly basis. You would start by making sure you have a modern website with proper SEO structure, research your keywords, and begin crafting blogs and sharing them on social media. The key to this step is to use call-to-actions on your pages and blog posts in order move them down the funnel.

Convert

Once the restaurant owner finds your website via social media or organic search - which we discussed in previous editions, Website Traffic Sources & SEO Best Practices - we want to convert them into a lead. You want to gather their information in exchange for a piece of content that they will find useful and informative. In order to do this you will use landing pages with forms on them to capture their information and use thank you pages to deliver the promised content. By capturing their information like a name, email address, and what their interested in, you can move to the next step which would be close.

Close

Now that you have some information on the restaurant owner - and what he/she is interested in via website traffic analytics - you can begin to nurture your new lead using email marketing, workflow automation, and closed loop reporting. Some people think game over at this point but that is not true. Once you have closed the sale and they have become a happy customer you want to keep them happy.

Delight

This is important for the long term health of your food service provider business. You want to keep the new restaurant owner happy with events, social media interaction, and smart content. By keeping them happy you will, hopefully, be their go-to provider if they open more locations. If they are not happy you might find yourself losing business.

So How Can Inbound Marketing Help My Business?

Hopefully we have answered the questions from the beginning, at least to peak your interest. If you're intrigued by the potential growth that inbound marketing can provide for your business you are on the right track.

Inbound marketing is not a simple process. It takes time and patience and a lot of effort. However, it can bring amazing results for your business and can show you an ROI right down to how much you paid for any given lead. You can also determine, with enough data, how much a lead is worth. From there you can determine how much energy and resources you are spending versus how much you are getting in return.

Summary

If you're content with the typical interrupting marketing tactics that have been around forever you should continue with what you are doing. If you want to increase your customer base with modern marketing methods, and feel like you're actually helping visitors, while getting reports on how much you paid for a lead you should consider inbound marketing.

By attracting visitors, converting them into leads, closing them as customers, and delighting these customers you can improve your bottom line and get a leg up on the competition.

Marketing Grader

Start improving your marketing by getting a free marketing grade. That's right get graded on your marketing presence. This grade will be emailed to you almost immediately upon completion.

That's it, that's all I got for this edition of Feet Up Friday, I am Brendan Gilbert with PatraCompany. Have an A1 Day.