What is inbound marketing?

So what is inbound marketing exactly? Well, some professionals are calling it “new marketing”. This type of marketing is focusing on delivering value upfront to your potential customers. This way, your potential customers will have already benefited from your marketing efforts before having to contribute with something of value to them. Inbound marketing is focused on delivering value, creating trust and developing a loyal and supportive customer base for your awesome brand.

What are the main pillars of inbound marketing?

So, what is the framework on which inbound marketing is operating? Well, inbound marketing has at its core three main concepts: 

• Attract: The first pillar is the attraction, which inbound marketing aims to generate. Inbound marketing is not only focusing on attracting leads, but it focuses on attracting the right type of leads, the ones which are more likely to convert and buy or use your services and products and ultimately become your happy customers. Instead of preying on the attention of the potential customer, it instead lets the customer come to your business on his own accord and on his own terms. In order to create this attraction, you have to use the content marketing strategy. What this means is that you have to create relevant content for your ideal customer. The content can come in various forms such as blog posts, informational videos, articles, books, e-books etc.

• Engage: Now that you have attracted the right kind of leads, you cannot sit back and relax with a piña colada in your hand. The next step is to further engage with your leads. To do this, you can engage in conversations with your leads through different mediums, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, E-mail, bots, live chat, etc. This is an important step because it facilitates the opportunity to foster important relationships with your audience. Next, you have to capture the information of your prospects by using conversion tools such as CTA, forms and lead flows. This will help you in creating a personalized experience for your prospects on your website. When people feel that their experience was optimized for them, it creates trust and brand loyalty.

• Delight: The final pillar of the inbound marketing is delight. How do you delight your prospects you might wonder. It’s easy, now that you have collected relevant information about your leads, you can further engage with your audience by using marketing automation and conversations. This will ensure that your Emails are targeting the right people with the right information every time. On top of that, create content that your leads will be happy to share with their family, friends, pets etc. Bonus points, if you deliver this content in your audience's favorite content format, like video for example.

Inbound marketing vs. outbound marketing

Now that you have a clearer understanding of what inbound marketing means, let’s take a look at what outbound marketing is and how the two of them compare.

Outbound marketing refers to any kind of marketing where a company is sending out a message to the audience. In outbound marketing, companies are competing for the attention of the customers. How do they do that? Well, in order to grab their attention, companies who use outbound marketing are usually interrupting their audience right in a moment when they are focused on something else with an ad that is totally irrelevant for them. Outbound marketing uses a “spray and pray” strategy in the hopes of collecting leads. What this means, is that they try to show their message to as many people as possible and hope to get noticed. However, because of this approach, people are increasingly getting more desensitized to the outbound marketing, meaning that people have learned to ignore the traditional types of marketing. On top of that, the advent of ad blockers has made it increasingly more difficult for marketers to get their message to reach their audience. The consequences of this being that outbound marketing becomes increasingly expensive, while generating low yields.

But how does inbound and outbound marketing compare in terms of statistics? Well, according to the statistics, inbound leads cost 61% less than outbound. On top of that, businesses that rely on inbound marketing are saving more than 14$ dollars per new acquired customer. 79% percent of business that have a blog report positive ROI for inbound marketing. Around 80% of business decision makers prefer to get their information out of a series of articles rather than advertisements. Properly implemented inbound marketing strategy is 10 times more effective for lead conversion than outbound marketing. The average cost per lead is dropping by 80% after 5 months of consistent inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is 62% cheaper than outbound marketing and it triples the leads.

Now, taking into account these statistics, it’s clear that inbound marketing is more efficient than traditional marketing.

How can inbound marketing influence your Drupal Business?

But how is this relevant to my Drupal business you might ask? Well, first of all, by creating awesome content for your business you will be able to attract the right type of leads, the ones that are already interested in your business or in the field that your business operates in. These leads are more likely to convert to happy customers. On top of that, you will significantly reduce your costs for marketing, all while generating more quality leads and creating awesome value and content for your prospects.

Another cool aspect of inbound marketing for your Drupal business is that it generates leads long after the content was posted, as long as it is updated from time to time. Think of inbound marketing as a long term investment in your business. You make the investment now and you reap the benefits over a longer period of time, than for example with outbound marketing. On top of that, and inbound marketing strategy won't stop working in case you run out of budget. Blogs, articles and videos posted on your website will still continue to generate traffic long after you have run out of budget, which is another great perk of doing inbound marketing.

Another great aspect of adopting an inbound marketing strategy for your Drupal business, is that it provides a clear overview over the Return on Investment. Traditional outbound marketing is really ineffective when it comes to measuring how many people see your advert. Inbound marketing on the other hand provides a transparent examination over the results that it generates and the impact that those leads have on you business's ROI.

Conclusion

Marketing is an ever evolving profession and people have to be constantly keeping up with the latest trends and emerging technologies in order to stay ahead of the game. The same goes for inbound marketing, it is a new way of doing marketing, which is essentially the opposite of the “old school marketing”. Now, companies and people have to adapt to a new “cool kid on the block”, but for the best results, like all things in life, a balance has to be achieved between outbound and inbound marketing.