How Inbound Marketing is Improving Marketing’s Bad Reputation

Before the Internet, marketing tactics involved reaching as many households and businesses as possible, regardless of fit or relevance. The idea was that at least some percentage of advertising would get through, and some fraction of the recipients would express an interest in the products and services being pushed. If audiences didn’t respond, marketers would instruct armies of telemarketers to call everyone on a “rented” list at all hours of the day or night and hope for forgiveness.

And the bill for mass advertising and telemarketing? Marketers spent hundreds of millions of dollars each year with low success rates and effectively poisoned the well for future sales.

Unfortunately for today’s consumers, not much has changed. Today’s marketers adapt the worst marketing practices to new tools like email, paid search ads, mobile and social media. The mantra continues to be “get in front of them, and they will come.” Unfortunately for most marketers, consumers now reject invasive marketing tactics of all kinds and have become adept at blocking unwanted email and online advertising.

Enter Inbound Marketing—a new style of marketing that discards outbound tactics in favor of earned media and relationship building. Inbound Marketing focuses on attracting and nurturing buyers with interesting, helpful content, and it’s improving marketing’s bad reputation.

Here are just two of the many ways Inbound Marketing is improving marketing’s bad reputation:

• It’s Less Invasive—With Inbound Marketing, content or offers are never “pushed” out to an unsubscribed list. Instead, they are posted in blogs, websites and social networks, and consumers interested in the content or offers come to you. Search engines like Google favor this type of content now and are more likely to include it in searches for relevant keywords and phrases by our likely customers.
• It Reaches at the Right Time—Research shows that more than 80 percent of captured leads are lost as sales opportunities because they are not yet ready to buy or they are ignored and move on to other resources to solve their problems. To solve these problems, inbound marketers use Lead Nurturing campaigns to stay in touch and “nurture” leads with additional, helpful content that gradually convinces leads that your product or service is the right solution for their needs.

So now that you have implemented Inbound Marketing that is less invasive and reaches potential customers at the right time, how can you make Inbound Marketing even better? By introducing Lean Digital Marketing into your strategy. Lean processes involve continuous improvement to operate more efficiently and to instill a sense of ownership by all stakeholders. Traditionally, we think of manufacturing as the primary beneficiary of lean, but any process can be improved this way, and marketing is no exception. 

To learn more about Lean Digital Marketing, download the latest ebook from Kuno Creative here.  

Do you agree inbound marketing is improving marketing’s bad reputation? What are some other ways you can add to the list?