Inbound Marketing

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Inbound Marketing is advertising a company through blogs, podcasts, video, eBooks, enews letters, whitepapers, SEO, social media marketing, and other forms of content marketing which serve to bring customers in closer to the brand, where they want to be. In contrast, buying attention, cold-calling, direct paper mail, radio, TV advertisements, sales flyers, spam,telemarketing and traditional advertising are considered “outbound marketing”. Inbound marketing earns the attention of customers, makes the company easy to be found and draws customers to the website by producing interesting content.In one case inbound marketing was defined by three phases: Get found, Convert and Analyze A newer model from Business2Community illustrates the concept in five stages:

1. Attract traffic
2. Convert visitors to leads
3. Convert leads to sales
4. Turn customers into repeat higher margin customers
5. Analyze for continuous improvement

Complex inbound marketing practices target potential customers at various different levels of product/brand awareness. The most scaled tactics attempt to funnel customers from semantically related market segments, who have no product awareness or intention to purchase. This is usually achieved by taking the customer through a structured informational path, that builds awareness and increases interest over time.