What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is the process of promoting your business via content being offered to the outside world. Examples of inbound marketing range from blogs to video, ebooks to social media. Anything that your customers can interact with in some way that will initiate a dialogue is considered inbound marketing. In contrast, cold calling and flyers are examples of outbound marketing. The idea is that producing interesting content serves to draw traffic to their website and engage potential leads.

Why should I use it?

Inbound marketing requires you to earn your way into a customer's life. Outbound marketing works sometimes, but often requires companies to beg, buy or bug their way in and it is costly, with a lot of churn. By contrast, earning your place in a customer's life means that they are emotionally attached, and less likely to leave as long as your service is good and your product lives up to expectations.

Earning your way in through inbound marketing also allows you to keep your finger on the pulse of customer interest to keep your marketing current. Customers will interact and engage with you in order to tell you what they want. If you listen and adjust your marketing accordingly, you've gained a valuable tool that keeps new customers coming and reduces churn. Simply put, engaging and nurturing your customers through inbound marketing is more effective at the same job as older, outbound marketing strategies have been in many cases.

How can I use inbound marketing?

You can use inbound marketing for many things. For one, you can educate your audience about your services and products. This is important and becomes more important as time goes on and the most educated generation in history becomes the primary consumer base. In addition, if you provide information that is more varied and in-depth than your competitors, you become the authority on that information, particularly if that content is accurate and read frequently. There are many other uses as well.

How can SimplyCast 360 help my inbound marketing?

The biggest way is word of mouth. By automating promotional emails and social media messages, you enable customers to share content on the internet. In addition, you have the ability to personalize messages. You can also use our software to automate deliveries of inbound content and notify people of new blog posts, social media announcements and more. When automating your email newsletter, for example, you would only have to edit once every three weeks, so that your newsletter was current. A single editing session happens once every three weeks, and your newsletter automatically goes to who it's supposed to and looks how it should.

For more information about SimplyCast 360, check out our marketing automation page.