what is inbound marketing and why you need it?

You must be thinking what is inbound marketing & if you’ve been googling ways to drive traffic to your website and grow your small business online, chances are, you have seen the term inbound marketing or lists of its strategies. Understanding inbound marketing, its phases and techniques can be overwhelming if you’re like the typical small business owner. You know your business, but how do you know which marketing strategies will be the best for you and how do you implement them?
In this article, you will learn inbound marketing basics and how you can use it to grow your business.

What is Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing (also known as digital marketing) is a collection of marketing strategies that have one common goal: to attract customers to your business. It is designed to bring potential customers into your business or website rather than using techniques that push your products and services out.

Think about how customers used to look for a business versus how it’s done today. Before the onset of this digital age and portable electronic devices, if someone was looking for a product or service, they would pick up a hard copy of the “Yellow Pages” to manually search for the perfect result. Today, your potential customers perform a quick Google search on their devices and get an instant result with much less effort. Inbound marketing uses techniques to ensure that your clients find YOU when they need you most. That means that at the precise moment they’re looking for you, you must show up.

Our Top 2 Inbound Marketing Strategies

To successfully implement an inbound marketing initiative, you will need to use a combination of techniques to draw the right people to your business. The following are our favorite methods because they yield great results.

1. SEO/ Content Marketing

You’ve probably seen “SEO” more times than you can count in your quest to find ways to drive traffic to your website. SEO stands for search engine optimization. This is the process of using search engine (like Google) best practices to increase your website visibility. The goal is to have your website or webpage appear higher in the rankings on a search engine results page (SERP). There are many ways to use SEO to improve your rankings, but we love content marketing most! Quality content marketing is developing effective keywords and using them naturally on your webpage to increase relevance and SERP ranking.

2. Social Media Marketing

This is one of the best free platforms you can use! Social media marketing allows you to get in front of your ideal customers fast. Not only do you get to advertise your products and services, but you can build a relationship with your potential customers by letting them get to know your brand. Deepen the relationship by interacting with page visitors in post comments. The most popular social media platforms offer business users options to use low cost paid marketing. This feature helps you reach a larger audience of potential customers.

Why You Need To Use Inbound Marketing NOW

Consumer shopping and buying behaviors have changed. More than 65% of consumers conduct online product research before stepping foot into a store. (Source: Retail Dive) That means the old days of traditional marketing are fading into obscurity. Your customers are online using electronic devices to conduct more than 3.5 billion searches on Google every day. (Source: Internet Live Statistics) You need to reach them now.

MSDS Entrepreneurs is a Houston-based digital marketing agency. We have one objective:  To make sure your company shows up whenever a customer searches for your products or services so you can get more sales. Learn more about inbound marketing and how we can help you get started today.