A century ago, big businesses such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Johnson+Johnson, and General Mills relied on outbound marketing to fuel their fast growth. And it worked wonderfully; so long as they kept pouring money into it. They’ve mastered the art of interruption based marketing. Everywhere you went and the activities you enjoyed doing, you can certainly count on the interruptions. An inconvenience most of us have grown to tolerate and even learned to ignore. This is the premise of outbound marketing.
Outbound marketing consists of advertisements, promotions, public media relations, sales, and such. All of which are designed to interrupt any activities you happen to be doing at the time. Watching your favorite sports team in a nail biting championship game? Surely you wouldn’t mind being interrupted with a few commercials inbetween timeouts. You may be interrupted with more commercials while you’re enjoying your favorite TV shows/movies. Your attention to driving on the highway may even be interrupted briefly with billboards. These types of interruption based methods has worked and dominated the marketing landscape for quite a long time though its reign is fast approaching a big wall.
Fast forward to the present and we suddenly find that the Internet has leveled many of the playing fields. We are now a part of the Internet based marketing revolution of what is commonly referred to as Inbound Marketing. This type of marketing consists of producing and offering extraordinary information such that customers can find you through search engines and social networking word-of-mouth. Instead of spending thousands to millions of dollars on traditional advertising and promotions; start-ups and big businesses are finding the benefits of blogs, social media outlets, and traffic generation to their websites.
Traditionally, word-of-mouth businesses are the best types of lead generation. With social networking, word-of-mouth moves at a lightning pace and its audience reach is boundless. Search engines direct motivated buyers to your website due to your extraordinary content. When search engines index your site’s content it catalogs it for when a potential customer searches for a particular product or service that matches what your company offers, it will then send the eager potential customer to your site. These types of leads will have the best conversion rates because they are already motivated to buy that particular product or service since they specifically searched for it.
A new startup would absolutely be able to compete against the bigger and more established businesses with sound inbound marketing strategies. If there isn’t much money to go around for a full blown advertising campaign, these startups can simply start a blog writing and offering extraordinary content to share with the social networking spheres as well as the search engines. If your content is really valuable and unique, you will begin to see more visitors being directed to your website.
These are exciting times to be an entrepreneur and/or business manager. More so, it is even more exciting for us to share our knowledge of online marketing with our visitors. If you haven’t done so, you can subscribe to our convenient RSS or Email feed by clicking on the icons to the right to receive our newsletters and exclusive preview access to our future articles.
