New Inbound Marketing Resources #IMU

Today we are launching a new area on our website dedicated to educational resources related to inbound marketing. But what the heck is inbound marketing anyway? It’s what we do here at Inkling Media as we seek to help you in your marketing efforts.

As David Meerman Scott says:

The tools of the marketing and PR trade have changed. The skills that worked offline to help you buy or beg or bug your way in are the skills of interruption and coercion.

Here are a few important definitions:

Outbound or traditional marketing – this is what most people think of when they use the term “marketing.” It involves traditional methods such as broadcast advertising, print, direct mail, billboards, and online methods such as banner ads or pop-ups. The idea is to go out and find customers or clients. In many ways you’re throwing messages out there and hoping that someone…anyone…catches them (and acts on them).

Inbound Marketing – This flips the entire marketing paradigm on its head, and is the art of “getting found.” In other words, you already know that people want what you have to offer. Rather than going out and finding them, your job is to help them find you.

The main elements of inbound marketing include blogging, Social Media, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). And these three work hand in hand:

• Blogging – creating new, relevant, and engaging content that others want, and that establishes you as a thought leader in your field.

• Social Media – creating communities on social network platforms where you can engage and dialogue with your current and potential customers.

• SEO – optimizing your digital properties via keywords, link-building, creating relevant content, and more, so that people have a better chance of finding you when they use Google and other search engines.

Inbound marketing has become more important because many of the traditional, or outbound, methods have become increasingly expensive and decreasingly effective. This isn’t to say that they don’t have a place in your marketing mix, but it’s estimated that the average American is confronted with more than 3,000 ad impressions each day. Yet how many of them do we remember?

The tools of inbound marketing, when used properly, can help you and your business save time and money, while increasing leads and conversions.

In other words, more bang for your buck. Hubspot’s Rebecca Corliss even wrote a guest post for us a while back on 5 Steps for Using Inbound Marketing to Grow Your Business.

I’ll be blogging about these more in the days to come, but in the meantime check out our new Educational Resources page. Our first section is dedicated to the highly informative and useful online classes provided by Hubspot via their Inbound Marketing University. We are Certified Inbound Marketing Professionals and our goal is to help you help your customers find you!

And in the near future, we’ll be giving away a copy of the book, Inbound Marketing, autographed by co-author Brian Halligan. So stay tuned for this and more, as well as more additions to our Educational Resources section.

Tagged as: blogging, inbound marketing, Marketing, seo, Social Media