The benefits of inbound marketing allow smart businesses to generate leads and increase revenues. This is, of course, the promise of most marketing strategies.
However, what makes inbound marketing special is that it's essentially free to implement –you just need to be willing to put in the work and create great content. However, once you're done, the marketing assets you create can continue to drive results for your business for years unlike paid marketing tactics that require you to continually pay. Plus as you will soon see, it is a much more natural way to sell.
So, how are businesses using inbound marketing to get results? By providing helpful content to potential customers and ensuring a great experience throughout every step of the buyer's journey. It sounds counter-intuitive. But by providing free value upfront, you set the stage for long, successful business relationships.
In this post, we’ll be taking a look at the following benefits of using inbound marketing to grow your business:
- Cost-Effective Marketing
- Establish Trust and Authority
- Become a Thought Leader within Industry
- Increase Organic Website Traffic
- Boost Your Website's SEO Ranking
- Easy to Manage
- Reap Long Term Marketing Benefits
Inbound marketing requires thinking about marketing in a slightly different way. Instead of trying to interrupt consumers and get their attention to advertise your services, you will instead provide them with helpful and informative content.
Done right, and you will experience the benefits of inbound marketing that will have customers coming to you, instead of the other way around. If you are unfamiliar with inbound marketing, we suggest checking out this post explaining what inbound marketing is.
Cost-Effective Marketing
One of the biggest benefits of inbound marketing is that it is not nearly as expensive as other popular forms of digital marketing.
While social media marketing and display or video ads require a significant budget to make an impact, that’s not the case with inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is all about creating content that your audience will find valuable. The most popular forms of content for inbound marketing include blog posts, videos, ebooks, podcasts, case studies, webinars, white-papers, and more. These types of content may include start-up or production costs, but they can be kept to a minimum.
The great thing about inbound marketing is that your audience will likely find your content organically. Meaning, your business won’t have to pay for traffic or leads. Overall, inbound marketing is probably the most cost-effective marketing strategy today. At its core, it’s a more human way to do business and promote your brand. As long as you or members of your team can develop a proper strategy and steadily produce content, you have all the resources needed to succeed.
Establish Trust and Authority
Inbound marketing is the only digital marketing strategy that properly takes into account consumer behavior or psychology and the online buyer's journey. The result is a marketing strategy that will allow you to resonate with consumers where other brands fall flat. Now more than ever, people want to do business with brands that are authentic and original.
Inbound marketing plays to your strengths and allows your business to stand out in the marketplace. Consumers, especially the younger ones, are increasingly less brand loyal. In fact, only 7% of millennials identify themselves as brand loyalists.
To stand out, you must establish trust with your audience and prove you know what you're talking about. Once you’ve done those two things, you are much more likely to close a sale over your competitors. Just think about it for a second.
Are you more or less likely to do business with a company that has demonstrated they know what they’re doing and can be trusted by providing you with free, helpful content?
Become a Thought Leader within Your Industry
Regularly producing great content related to your work will help you build authority and trust within your industry, as well as your customer base. This can pay big dividends down the line. It can help you get invited to speaking or networking events to raise your company’s profile.
News and media outlets might even start reaching out to you, and potential customers will trust you more, since you’ve demonstrated you know what you’re talking about and offered free value upfront. All that is going to result in much more exposure and opportunity for your business.
Increase Organic Website Traffic
In order to be able to generate leads with your website, you first need to drive traffic towards it. If your website has few visitors, it’s going to be awfully hard to generate leads and get the highest ROI out of your site.
The benefits of inbound marketing and producing content in general will allow you to attract new visitors to your website. Regularly producing interesting content will allow people searching for terms related to your business on Google to find your website.
This type of website traffic is highly valuable, as people generally search for these terms when they are at the beginning of researching a purchase. If you can get your company's content in front of a buyer as soon as they begin shopping, you're already miles ahead of the competition.
The more content you produce, the more ways you give people to find you. And the more content on your site, the better chance you have on ranking on Google. Which brings us to our next point.
Boost Your Website's SEO Ranking
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) allows your website and its content to rank on search engines like Google or Bing. This means the pages on your website will appear higher up on the search results of Google. This is huge, as 91% of all traffic from Google goes to websites listed on the first page. Meaning, you really need to prioritize ranking on Google’s first page to get the full benefits of inbound marketing.
The better your website ranks, the more traffic you will be able to generate with your inbound marketing efforts and the more traffic you can generate, the more likely you will be able to generate potential sales leads for your business. At the end of the day, it’s a numbers game.
Here we start to see the flywheel effect, another one of the benefits of inbound marketing. The more content you produce will only further increase your SEO authority, resulting in more traffic and more leads.
Easy to Manage
One of the great benefits of inbound marketing is it doesn’t need to be extremely complicated or time-consuming. Once you are familiar with the inbound methodology and get comfortable producing content, it is very easy to manage your inbound marketing strategy.
To help, we definitely recommend going through this short inbound marketing course from Hubspot Academy. It’s the fastest way to get up to speed on this new way to think about your company’s marketing. Next, we recommend using some of these inbound marketing templates from Hubspot to help you brainstorm and manage your inbound marketing strategy.
Taking the time to learn the basics and properly plan will help you get the most benefits out of inbound marketing.
Reap Long Term Marketing Benefits
Inbound marketing is a strategy that will allow your business to establish a strong foundation for its digital marketing activities for years to come. With inbound marketing, your company can organically grow its SEO authority, email subscriber list, social media following, and brand/customer loyalty. These are all foundational elements of promoting your business today, and can’t simply be accomplished by throwing some money at online ads.
The biggest benefit of inbound marketing is that it allows your business to grow for the long term. By focusing on creating helpful experiences for your customers instead of spamming them with ads, you not only help them but also your company.
Conclusion
The benefits of inbound marketing are undeniable. Case study after case study has proven it to be a great way to advertise your company and differentiate your brand. Inbound marketing is effective because it takes into account the buyer’s needs and human psychology.
Once you understand what your target audience is after, you can reverse engineer your sales process to provide them valuable content that keeps them moving down your sales funnel.
