Not all online marketing is born equal. In fact, there are two specific groups that most marketing methods can be separated into. Outbound marketing is about pushing your message, it’s about putting adverts in the right place, reaching customers directly, and reaching out. Inbound marketing is about building your presence so that more people come to you. In this article, you’ll see why you need to focus more on that presence and how it can have a much more permanent impact on your business.
Constructing content
One of the latest ‘hot techniques’ that’s being touted left, right and center is content creation. For good reason, too. Creating content gives people who weren’t looking for your business the opportunity to come face-to-face with it. Solving problems and providing information on subjects related to what your business does means that they’re likely to come into contact with it and your business indirectly when they look for those answers. It also does a lot to show that you know what you’re talking about, creating legitimacy around your business. Any online business will tell you that earning that kind of trust is crucial to winning customers over.
Creating connections
Having all the answers on a part of your site is going to make the site as a whole more visible. That visibility is to be treasured and fought for, given how many other sites on the internet are competing for it. That’s what search optimization is all about. However, there are a lot of misunderstandings on how it works. As https://seojet.net/blog/build-backlinks shows, it’s about creating a focus for backlinks and putting them in the most reliable places. Going the whole hog, using every keyword and every linking opportunity available, can work contrary to your desires. Search engines recognize when someone is trying to abuse the methods they use to decide how visible a site should be. It takes a bit of planning and careful placement, but good SEO can give your site and your business the spotlight, which is all too valuable.
Clicking crazy
Using search engine optimization isn’t the only way to make sure that you appear during your consumer market’s searches, however. Pay per clicks give you the opportunity to take precedence during those searches. However, it’s important to be aware of the inherent weaknesses of the method. You’re paying for clicks, not purchases, and you’ll get roughly 30% of people who see your ad clicking. Most importantly, if you don’t have a well-designed site, you’re likely to only be paying for those clicks before you lose them entirely as soon as they see your homepage. PPC isn’t a tool that will work well on its own. Rather, it needs the substance to go with it.
Calling to action
For that reason, you need to make sure that your site itself has the ability to backup the promise of the PPC ads you’re using. Having the site focus on the visitor first and foremost should be the decision at the heart of any design choices. Second to that should be convincing the visitor to convert into a customer. Calls-to-action, exciting content, and easy navigation to finding and buying your products and services are the start. Not only should you be using the right tools, you should be looking at how they work. Heat map services from places like CrazyEgg can show you exactly where the attention is going on your site. Using the elements that work to influence the rest of the site’s design could make it all a lot more appealing to customers.
Conversing
Social media, in a lot of respects, is what some would consider an outbound method. A lot of it is used purely to further disseminate the marketing message in a new format. But a strong social presence is one of the strongest inbound tools you can use. This is one of the reasons you should be stimulating your online community by constantly communicating with them and curating content for them. When people see an active community online, it’s positive social proof of a business that is active and takes its consumer base seriously. There are few stronger emotional strings to tug upon than the sense of community after all.
The best businesses create a digital marketing plan that makes good use of both outbound and inbound marketing methods. But the truth is that the methods of outbound marketing are easier, which is why people use it. However, you could be missing the most cost-effective and longest-lasting campaigns by not considering the innovation that inbound marketing could bring to the business.
