You know why you need an inbound marketing plan. It helps you drive traffic to your website and ultimately increase your sales. That’s what all the numbers measure, and that’s what makes the whole process worthwhile. While this is not wrong, it’s also not the whole story. There’s a lot more to inbound marketing than sales and website traffic. There are all sorts of other benefits that can also come from implementing an inbound marketing strategy, if you do it right. Here are five of them.
- Low cost. Not only is inbound marketing more effective than outbound marketing, it also costs considerably less to implement—around 62 percent less per lead.
- Measurable results. But how do you know that your inbound marketing campaign has been successful? What results is it actually yielding? With traditional forms of marketing, a lot of that measurement is educated guesswork. But with an online inbound marketing campaign, every search term and every click of the mouse can be tracked, measured and quantified. How many people clicked on that blog you posted? What search terms led them to find it? Did they click through to your website? Did they open the e-mail you sent? With a good analytics program, you can see exactly how well your campaign is doing and how many sales have come about because of it, either directly or indirectly. This also allows you to make adjustments to the campaign as it goes along, making it a fluid entity that grows and evolves, rather than a static fixture that gets reevaluated maybe every quarter.
- Two-way communication. One of the things that inbound marketing allows you to do is to interact and communicate directly with your audience through blog comments, social media, etc., getting feedback on what they’re looking for and what they think of you and your brand. This in and of itself has multiple benefits. Connecting with your audience on a personal, individual level helps build their trust in you and your brand. Seeing their feedback helps you to direct and focus your campaign better going forward. And you can use their comments and questions as fodder for future content.
- Increased credibility and brand recognition. As already mentioned, connecting with your audience helps build their trust, establishing you as an expert and someone worth listening to. In so doing, you also increase your brand recognition. The more people view and share your content, the more familiar they’ll become with your brand. And as you post content regularly, they’ll begin looking forward to seeing it.
- Added value. When the credibility of your brand increases, so does the perceived value of the products or services you offer. You prove yourself as an expert through your content and social media. Ergo, what you’re selling must be of superior quality.
Inbound marketing helps you drive sales, sure. But more than that, it helps you build up a reputation. It helps you earn respect. It improves the way you do business and the way you communicate with your customers. Inbound marketing is a smart decision all around.
