What is Inbound Marketing and How Can it Help Your Business

Marketing your business's product or service through the use of media like videos, blogs, social media outreach and SEO is known as inbound marketing. Inbound marketing provides you with a way to drive web traffic that is positive and non-manipulative, based on content marketing materials that are genuine and based on offers, promotions, or interesting things going on with your business. If you have been dissatisfied by your search engine optimization or SEO inbound marketing efforts or these efforts have failed to generate true interest, it is time to gain a better understanding of how SEO is changing and how inbound marketing can benefit your business's growth.

Long gone are the days when the web can be used as a tool to control consumer behavior that is one-sided or based on deception, misdirection or not providing something of value for consumers to build a brand loyalty with. In the old days, merely slapping up a website and putting up irrelevant content that mentioned your company's name 500 times was enough to increase your rankings and position you well on a search engine's list. Not anymore. Today, you have to engage in strategic marketing efforts of content marketing that includes the creation of new and timely materials, blogging and involve email campaigns, social media outreach efforts and other tools to raise visibility and create links.

The Use of Email Marketing as a Tool for Inbound Marketing

Email marketing is probably one of the oldest and most established ways to create interest and excitement around your company's products and services. Email marketing involves a process of obtaining the names of existing and potential customers and creating campaigns that are directed to their specific interests. You can gauge those interests through occasional surveys, comment cards and interactive message boards that provide your customers with an opportunity to give feedback and exchange ideas with you. You can also use email as a way to create topics for your content marketing materials or blogging efforts.

How Blogging Can Improve Your Inbound Marketing Results

In addition to a well-coordinated email marketing campaign as part of your SEO internet marketing effort, you should use blogs as a way to actively and constantly communicate with your customer. Blogs, which most every website hosting company typically provides as part of their service package, are easy to set up, make relevant and keep up to date. They provide a cost effective way to keep consumers up-to-date on product enhancements, latest advances relevant to their experiences or launch new products. If you do not have staff with the experience or time to properly maintain your blogging effort online, it can be outsourced for a very low amount, freeing you up to focus on the core business.

How Important is Social Media?

Every company these days maintains some type of presence on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook and many others. This presence can be for better or for worse depending on how well and effective the presence is managed and kept relevant. Social media is a great compliment to internet marketing effort and SEO because a message with a link back to your website can be sent to a few people and quickly multiplied and sent to thousands of people in the matter of minutes.

Whether your inbound marketing efforts include email marketing, blogging or social media you should ensure that in all of these they relate to your SEO strategy and fit your overall goals for building brand identity and loyalty in the marketplace. Your content must be maintained and kept fresh and based on relevancy in order to yield successful results.