What is Inbound Marketing?

The term” Inbound “, means that instead of marketer reaching out to consumer, they leave trails of content such as blog posts, podcasts, PR releases, blog comments, videos etc. through which their clients find their website/business. Traditional marketing works other way around. In traditional marketing you find clients. This is more like upselling your product before your consumers even know that you are promoting them something.

There is a secret of Advertising which has been emphasized again and again by Advertising and PR experts such as David Ogilvy and Edward Bernays. The less your advertisement looks like an advertisement the more chances it has of persuading your clients to buy the product which you are promoting. David Ogilvy mentioned that your advertisement must look like an editorial as people read editorials with much more interest than they read advertisement. Whenever each one of us sees an advertisement our psychological defenses are activated and we try to find reasons to avoid spending our money. So advertisers learnt long ago that the best way to sell is not to sell or at least appear that you are not selling anything.

This is what Inbound Marketer tries to achieve through their content. Any consumer doesn’t buys a thing if he is not mentally prepared to spend on a particular product/service. Through Inbound Marketing you can get your clients in a situation that when you pop up the question there answer will be “YES”. This is like proposing a girl you like. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve known each other if you ask the question at the wrong time you are surely going to receive a big “NO”. So an experienced person will try to build trust before asking the question the same way it’s here in Inbound Marketing. Before asking your clients to purchase your product/service you have to educate them, build trust with them and then at the right moment ask the right question. This is the main idea behind Inbound Marketing. You will not be promoting your product/service to people don’t need it instead you will be promoting it to ones who have arrived at your website with an interest to buy from you.

The best part of this is that Inbound Marketing is not as expensive as buying an Ad during Super Bowl or paying media companies millions of dollars. The only thing you are supposed to provide is your valuable time and some amount of money which is certainly nothing as compared to the amount spent on traditional methods of advertising.

Hamzah Qutub
http://www.inboundmarketers.co.uk