Top 14 Reasons Why Inbound Marketing is Important in 2021
When was the last time you stopped on a street to read a billboard?
The last time you picked up a sales call and actually took an interest in the conversation?
Do you remember, when you went out to actually search for something in the market?
It’s clearly no. Even if you did, the interest wouldn’t have lasted more than a minute. So why is that and what is the alternative to it?
Nobody is free to pay attention to ads & offers in the newspapers. People watch less television and waste more time surfing channels, they immediately swap between stations on the radio if the music is not playing. Even the target audience uses printed pamphlets as tissues or worse eat snacks on them.
This is the real story of old marketing tactics and outbound marketing is arguably on the verge of vanishing from the market.
Then the most critical question arises, where does a brand & product stand amidst all this?
But as we all know human tendencies, people leave behind something for something better ahead.
14 Reasons Why Inbound Marketing is Effective
This is where inbound marketing takes over and there are substantial reasons associated with it –
1. Digital Presence
Businesses open and shut-in every two to three days. Before you know it there is already someone with the same idea which you were planning to pitch to your clients. What you have to offer is already being offered by someone else at a more affordable price.
The reason being, nobody has the time to visit your store or office, to bargain. Gone are the days of window shopping and people don’t go out anymore to eat they order food online.
So how will you let people realize that you are a brand worth their time & attention?
To mark your presence and make the users feel it by your creativity.
Having a website gives you an official address in the digital world, which is very important, to have a website, where people can reach out to you, read about you, get engaged with you. Also, on the contrary, it gives you an opportunity to interact with your customers and visitors and turn them into regular customers and enhance sales.
Your website works as your brand & product biography.
2. Building Quality Relationships
Inbound marketing is not just a way of advertising but a two-way communication through which you build long-lasting relations with your customers & clients.
When a user visits your website you make them subscribe to your channel, website, notifications, and newsletter services. Now here is the crucial part – you must amaze & delight the users with your content & offers to make sure the user not only visits your website but stays there. With the right CTAs you communicate with them, ask them to fill in details sharing their contact number, email address, interests, and information which you may further use to pitch them your products and services.
Social media is, in fact, a huge platform for inbound marketing, One such example is of influencer marketing done by Instagram users who enjoy a huge number of following & engagement. Marketers collaborate with them for their brand promotion and know exactly how to leverage the instagrammability of their brand taking advantage of their social media accounts, the number of followers, likes, and engagement rate for their brand by creating unique content with them.
3. Saves Time
While most people get their daily dose of news & information from the Internet, it becomes inevitable for a brand to ignore the impact of social media platforms and digital marketing in our lives.
Nobody wants to get out of their homes, not even from their bed to reach out or to buy something, they search for it, find it, compare it, and order it online. That’s it.
So how is your brand or product going to survive?
With creativity & content.
This is where inbound marketing comes into the picture. With over 80% of people spending most of their time on smartphones, tablets, and laptops, people are living their lives on the go and are in a rush. So how do you plan to chase them with your marketing tactics?
The answer is you don’t.
You don’t chase them, you stop them, shake them and make them recognize your content by innovating yourself, coming up with out of the box strategies, realizing the credibility and potential of your brand.
4. Your Audience Finds You
If you keep disturbing them with your brands and offers by sales calls, ads, bugging them every now and then with your old marketing strategies which basically are not even strategies anymore, they will never take you or your brand seriously, it will never spark the interest in them.
Instead, be who you are, speak about yourself with your content so they come down searching for it. Think of it this way, if you are regularly creating content on trending topics and subjects, it appeals to the users, and when they want to read it, they come searching for it.
That’s where you ace your game, you marvel them with such good content that it sticks to their minds and they make sure they subscribe to your channel, website, newsletter, and notifications.
5. It’s About Time
It’s 2020,
If you’re only targeting one keyword with relevant pages, it is of no use in 2020. Google now looks for a certain level of quality in content else there are already thousands of websites doing exactly what you are doing.
I totally agree with the fact that every brand needs a certain time to make it big in the market whether it’s the real market or the digital market but for that, you need to be persistent with your efforts of honing your strategies.
We all want our brand name in the golden triangle of Google results.
6. Marketing Automation
By 2020, customers will manage 85% of relationships without talking to a human.
The promotional messages you receive, the brand emails that are there in your inbox, nobody types that for one customer to another, neither they are copy-pasted every single time.
Marketing automation helps brands to effectively send messages, emails, offers, and promotional texts to their target audience.
It is a segment of customer relations management that removes the stress of repetitive tasks and staff overflows.
7. Email Marketing
People recognize your brand, visit your website, like your content but they don’t want to be a paid customer of your service.
This is a typical scenario where email marketing helps in generating sales. By constantly emailing them newsletters, information, and offers you make sure that you get their attention.
Every now & then there will be a user who will be astonished by your content and would click to a paid customer.
The critical part is to analyze the user. Once users start visiting your website through SEO, blogs, articles, newsletters, and content you need to make sure an assessment check of their overall behavior.
8. Customization
Users are what they seek – This is the simple idea of inbound marketing.
Needless to say, we all have different personalities, interests, opinions, likes, and dislikes.
With the help of relevant data, links clicked, browsing the history, you provide users what they seek, which ultimately acts in your favor.
So if you create quality content, it’s good, but if you are creating customized content for your users – it’s great.
You need to have a wide vision while creating an inbound marketing plan for your brand covering and considering all the aspects and ways of promoting your brand through it.
This helps you score goodwill and credibility in the eyes of your audience, they trust your content & information, share it among their friends and family also through their social media handles providing organic traffic to your website
9. Social Media Outreach
Social media platforms are a substantial part of inbound marketing, Over 90% of people are present and active on at least one of the social media platforms whether it be a top-rated and popular social media platforms like Instagram & Facebook or one which is not so popular but is gaining popularity with time like Ask.fm, Reddit and Nextdoor
Your brand needs to come up with a good & wise inbound marketing strategy and cover them all depending upon what exactly your vision and aim is, regarding your brand and business.
For example – to start with, pictures, videos & visuals are something that makes people stop scrolling their news feeds and home page and they take a minute to actually look at them. Brands must post promotional and quality content posts along with videos and pictures because it promises and brings more engagement to your posts and brands than plain posts.
10. Google Is Your Friend
Google uses ranking factor and other social signals making it easy for users to share your website content on Google+
Google is your friend who will help you only if you will help him.
By providing all the relevant data it seeks in your meta descriptions & alt tags, creating good quality and being active on social media, researching and coming up with new subjects & ideas you help Google find you and Google helps people to find you.
Google is your friend but you must know how to use it in the right way.
11. Guest Blogging
Guest blogging also known as guest posts is to help and contribute to another blogger’s website to help and generate more traffic through posts strategically linked and smartly written with the right keywords so as to use SEO tools to help the website in ranking factor.
Links play the initial role in the ranking factor of Google, guest blogging brings organic traffic, and inbound leads to the brand.
The idea is simple & effective – Â write a blog article according to the requirements of a particular blogger and in return get a backlink.
Bloggers are interested in high-quality content that they can use to attract new readers, as well as share with their old & current audience.
12. Voice Search
Hey Siri!!
Hello Google!!
Cortana & Bixby
These are your new personal assistants. With new-age technology people do not like to type into their gadgets, they like to speak with them. Voice searches have witnessed exponential growth and it is expected that by 2020 – Â 50%Â of overall searches will be voice searches.
Hummingbird is the update that changed the search process and experience of Google for the long term. It basically concentrates on the semantic search which helps in understanding the context & interest of the user while searching for something on Google through which it shows more accurate and precise results.
This has driven companies to incorporate voice searches in their inbound marketing strategies for the future.
13. Video Marketing
When we talk about digital marketing, videos are more interactive, engaging, and informative than blogs and written content, posts will ever be.
Brands use videos for promotion of the productions, Q&A sessions, webinars, demos & testimonials.
It has been observed that 64% of people are more likely to buy a product after watching its videos.
Visuals are more strong than something you read and it gives a 360 view of what exactly you are buying and looking at.
14. Knowing Your Customer
Inbound marketing helps you not only to find your target audience but to know your customers on better terms.
Your one customer may differ from your other customers. When a user visits your page or website they may like one content and may not like the other, It may happen that the user is repeatedly coming back for the same piece of content. Now how you cater to all of them and delight them with your content is something very crucial to work on.
With changing times, brands have already adopted inbound marketing and it will go on to shape the future of digital marketing, advertisements & promotions. Inbound marketing is not just important but has become inevitable now.
Inbound marketing is user-friendly and provides a good user experience because it saves time and gives users exactly what they need and search for.
- Information
- Interaction
- Content
- Credibility
With all these aspects inbound marketing becomes essential in 2020.