What is inbound marketing and why it matters

When businesses reach out to us, it is what we call an inbound lead. We haven’t sent them an email, called them or reached out them to proactively in any way, yet they are looking for us. In short, this is awesome and we really love it.

However, this doesn’t happen to every business and there are numerous reasons why. That is why we’re putting together this post on inbound marketing and why it should matter to your business. The question is simple, do you want to grow your business and get new clients? If that is a yes, then you should most probably care about inbound marketing or inbound lead generation.

READ MORE: Here’s how Public relations or PR helps with inbound lead generation

What is inbound marketing or inbound lead generation?

Inbound marketing is the process of getting potential customers to find your company. These generally relate to strategies that aim to create brand awareness and attract new business. Generally, there are two types of marketing – inbound and outbound. Outbound focuses on reaching customers directly to generate sales and new business, while inbound marketing focuses on building awareness, developing relationships, and generating leads. The latter is seen as more of a longer-term strategy.

How we define inbound marketing at SYNC is simple – our focus is to build your brand equity and awareness, to the point where your potential customers know why, how and where to find you when they need your services or brand. When done in the right way, we have seen inbound marketing improve inbound lead generation and develop long-term success for a brand.

Inbound marketing versus outbound marketing

Typically, businesses employ either one or the other – or in most cases nowadays apply both forms of marketing.

At the company, we see inbound marketing as using your own platforms and earned media to ‘market’ to potential customers. This generally refers to the following:

• Owned media: your website, social media channels, blog, or any platform that you have full control over to create and share content on. This does require
• Earned media: this refers to publicity or media coverage of your brand or even on social media platforms, which are unpaid and earned due to the content you’ve created or a sucessful campaign that your followers, advocates or community shares with their own network.

This is generally unpaid media, as there is no cost associated with the content being placed on these platforms.

There is the other side which is outbound marketing or the use of paid media. This could be anything from advertising – digital or traditional -, influencer marketing, social media ads or some form of content sharing that requires payment.

We don’t see either form of marketing as being better or worse, because it depends on the brand and what form suits it best. When we first started the business, outbound was the most effective manner to build our client portfolio, because we didn’t have the infrastructure and manpower to handle inbound lead generation effectively. However, as we grew in size and built up our digital assets, we were able to create a sustainable and effective inbound marketing strategy that has helped us grow double-digits every single month in the last year or so.

How inbound marketing works

How inbound marketing works is pretty simple and usually, we break it down in these ways:

• Get your customer to know who you are: your content is the most effective way for a potential customer to know who you are. The first step in any campaign is brand awareness, because having a great product is one thing, but it doesn’t matter if none of your customers know you exist.
• Attract customers who have motivation to buy: one of the most frustrating things that can happen to a business owner or a decision-maker is to get bombarded with sales calls or aggressive marketing tactics for products you don’t need or want right now. Inbound marketing helps filter those out and is only acted by potential customers who want your product or service.
• Build for sustainability, not for short-term gain: I know everyone wants sales immediately, I know I want to get new customers every single minute of every single day, but let’s face it, that’s not always possible. So, we focused on building a sustainable inbound marketing strategy that helped us continually grow.

To help you better understand, here are some of the tactics and strategies we’ve used for SYNC and our clients.

How we help increase your inbound lead generation

Whether it is our clients or the companies that we work with, we generally provide the following services to help them with their inbound lead generation.

Public relations

This one is easy. We are a public relations company and we have the tools and expertise to help businesses get featured in the news. This falls under earned media and is a critical way to build brand awareness, as well as share your content (narratives, brand story and more) to a much wider audience.

How this helps attract new customers is by putting your brand front and centre to a much wider audience than you might generally have. If done right and there is a strong narrative, your potential customers should reach out to you to enquire about your services. This does require consistency though because it is about reaching your potential customer when they are in need of your services, which is the lowest hanging fruit out there. This needs to be repeated over a period of many months to acquire a sizeable portion of your addressable market.

Content

How do you create content that engages and educates at the same time? Well, we focus on trying to build your educational and conversion content at the same time. No matter how strong the motivation is to purchase, a potential customer will leave if the content is terrible or not very clear on what you do.

This is also is essential for your SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. You need fresh content to rank better on search engines for the search terms you care about to get customers to come to you. We explain more below.

SEO

Following on the content section, it is directly related to SEO. We help brands build their SEO content to make sure they rank on search engines for the relevant search terms. Most consumers (B2C and B2B customers) search for the solution to their problems rather than by brand name. Eg. I am not looking for SYNC PR if I am a new startup founder, I am probably looking for a PR agency for startups or PR agency [insert country here]. Therefore, the content you have on your website needs to be relevant to these searches and ultimately rank high on the search engine.

READ MORE: Here’s a basic guide to SEO that might be useful

This is one of the most useful inbound marketing tactics that we provide for our customers and has been really useful for our business. It has been sustainable and also allowed us to scale without needing to invest too much into our acquisition budget.

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If you’re interested in improving your inbound lead generation for your business and boosting your growth, drop us a message at hello(@)syncpr.co and one of our consultants will reach out to you soon. Please leave a comment or let us know on social media if you have any questions.