Inbound Marketing – Pros and Cons

Inbound marketing is a marketing methodology that is designed to draw visitors and potential customers in, rather than outwardly pushing a brand, product or service onto prospects in the hope of generating leads or customers. It’s about creating valuable experiences that have a positive impact on people and your business. The focus is on attracting prospects and customers to your website and blog through relevant and helpful content. Once they arrive, you engage with them using conversational tools like email and chat and by promising continued value.

Compared with outbound marketing, inbound reverses the relationship between company and customer. In fact, while outbound marketing is going to push the product through various channels, inbound marketing creates awareness, attracts and helps new customers with channels like blogs, social media, etc.

Inbound marketing has some clear advantages -

• Reach the right audience in the right place to generate quality traffic - By focusing your inbound marketing work on reaching the right audiences in the right places, you can attract your target customers to meet your digital marketing objectives. This is instead of spending money attracting traffic from people who are unlikely to ever convert.
• Increase trust - Inbound marketing is all about giving potential customers the information they are looking for – even if they don’t know it – in a creative and engaging way. It’s not about pushing unwanted sales at every opportunity. By using inbound marketing to present your brand as a useful and reliable resource, the hope is they’ll come to you when the time to purchase does arise.
•  Protect from over-reliance on one channel - By pursuing quality traffic from a variety of sources – organic search, social media referrals, referrals from other websites talking about your amazing work – you reduce the reliance on one channel alone, and therefore the associated risk.

But with these advantages there are also certain pitfalls that marketers need to be aware of

• Successful inbound marketing requires a LOT of content, in a variety of forms. A lot more than one realizes when you start a content marketing initiative. This obviously creates a lot of pressure on content creators and technology that hosts and serves content.
• Effective utilization of inbound marketing requires integration and utilization of automated marketing tools and reports. These are essential to find out who the visitors are, what content they accessed and their key interests. This information is required to guide these leads through the marketing funnel.
• Leads identified may not be as qualified as marketers assume. A person accessing certain content may not be ready to buy an expensive product. The lead nurturing process needs to be carefully executed to convert high value leads into true customer. This cannot be circumvented by inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing is getting increasingly popular especially as marketing technologies continue to evolve and develop. The question if the return on additional effort is worth it or not is highly dependent on the company applying this methodology and their solution for executing this technique.