Inbound / Outbound. What’s The Difference?
I have heard people talk about outbound and inbound marketing companies, and some people often conflate the two. They think that inbound marketing is closely aligned with outbound marketing, and they conjure up the image of a busy call-centre environment where sales staff makes pressurized cold calls to unwitting civilians, which enforces a negative opinion. But an inbound marketing company employs the opposite tactic! If you are starting out in business, hiring some help from an inbound marketing company is a positive step forward:
- It is passive. There are no pushy phone calls made to people to try and gather clientele. The majority of people acknowledge that interruptions like this are a total hindrance. It is much better to let people stumble across you in we-based inquiry.
- It is dignified. Their marketing is purely based on positively advertising a product and making sure that it populates the web and encounters the right people.
So How Can An Inbound Marketing Company Spread My Word?
- SEO: The initial interplay between user and website is crucial. To make that interplay happen frequently you need to make your site optimised. The inbound marketing company will determine appropriate keywords for your service or product. They imagine the lines of inquiry that people will be opening in their search engine whereby your site would provide the answer or solution. So when prospects enter the relevant keywords into their search engine, your site will rank higher in the search results.
- Blogging: A secondary way to govern how much interest you generate for your site is to blog. This has many advantages like making you look like a connoisseur in your field and giving you an opportunity to use more associated keywords and making your site rank higher in search results. It has been reported that companies that blog have 55% more traffic than those that don’t.
- Conversion: This is the process which turns casual visitors into clients and subsequently keeps them as clients! It’s is important to keep regular contact with your customers. They are not obliged to be loyal to your company. But regular contact with them to see how you can assist them with your service makes them catered for, and that may be reciprocated with some custom!
- Analytics: Evaluating what is working and what isn’t working so good. A meeting with yourself to establish how many visitors / clients you are gaining and what you can do to improve your strategy. Collating feedback in the form of surveys from your customers is a helpful exercise.
- Social Media: How much traffic you get also depends on your presence on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We all know that people are generally more responsive to social media marketing than telemarketing which is often perceived as being quite intrusive.
Failure Story
A friend of mine tried to set up his own photography business several years ago. His product was outstanding. But he was doomed to fail. He was naïve enough to think that the strength of the product with a bit of word-of-mouth will be enough breed interest so very little time was expended on marketing his photography in a prudent way. He should have hired the services from an inbound marketing company to throw his product out there and develop his presence in cyberspace!
