Today, let's get back to the basics.
If you're new to online marketing and wondering how to get a foothold, you might be wondering exactly what "inbound marketing" is, and how it works. After all, inbound marketing is significantly different from previous offline marketing tactics, and understanding the differences is the first step in building effective inbound strategies.
So, lets talk about what "inbound marketing" means, and what Hubspot has to do with it.
An Introduction To Inbound Marketing
The problem with old-style "outbound" marketing strategies is that nobody really liked them.
Most "outbound" marketing strategies are essentially disruptive in nature. Your lead is in the middle of an activity - such as watching TV, or going for a drive - and your messages are inserted into that. If someone's watching TV, it's interrupted with advertisements. If they're driving, billboards break up the view.
While it was the best marketing we had at the time, there were several major problems with outbound marketing:
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It's totally scattershot. You're interrupting millions in hopes of attracting dozens, or hundreds.
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There's rarely a good way to determine precise ROI. You'll never know with any accuracy how many sales (if any) a billboard or radio spot inspires.
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There are no takebacks. If a magazine goes out with a misprinted or embarrassing ad, those magazines will still exist for years or decades.
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Disruptive techniques often annoy customers at least as much as they inspire them, hurting brand perceptions.
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Mass-market messages fit for millions are necessarily watered-down and therefore rarely meaningful to any single viewer, personally.
Finally, consider also that as the Internet becomes increasingly-used, demands on your leads' time will also increase. More messages competing for their attention means less chance of them seeing your message, unless you give them a reason to care.
Enter inbound marketing.
Inbound Marketing: If You Post It, They Will Come
If there is an essence to inbound strategies, it's this: inspiring leads to come to you rather than forcing yourself upon them.
Inbound leverages the power of search engines to send traffic all around the Internet. If someone, for example, is interested in pet grooming services, they're going to go to Google and search for something like "Pet grooming advice." If your website is among the top hits, they'll go to you for that advice.
If they're impressed by what they see, they're then far more likely to choose your pet grooming services. (Or whatever you offer.)
So, leads pre-qualify themselves through their online searches, and you put your message in front of them at the moment that they want information related to your business. Therefore, the ultimate goal of an inbound campaign is usually to have highly-placed results on Google and Bing, which is also known as "search engine optimization."
And there's an entire new science to this.
Hubspot Makes Inbound Marketing Easy
Online marketing is driven by data and analytics:
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Who's visiting your site?
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What search terms are they using to get there?
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When do they visit?
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Where are they physically when they visit?
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Why are they looking at your site?
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How are they interacting when they get there?
And soforth.
Hubspot is currently the Internet's best option for tracking, managing, and reporting usage statistics like these. As a full-featured Content Management System (CMS), it has the power to track every piece of information you put on your site, along with its effectiveness and what users do after seeing it.
Hubspot also contains a range of tools for analyzing websites and suggesting improvements aimed at attracting more visitors, and more interactions with your website once they get there.
The combination of inbound marketing strategies and Hubspot makes it simple for even new businesses to get a jumpstart in online marketing!
98toGo is a Gold-level certified Hubspot partner, and we're here to help your inbound campaigns succeed. Please don't hesitate to contact us with any questions you might have!
