Inbound Marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on allowing customers to discover you, instead of interrupting them with spam or making cold calls to draw attention to your business. It does this through the savvy use of social media, search engines, and other online resources such as blogs, in an attempt to start meaningful conversions between your company and its potential clients.
The oldest form of Inbound Marketing on the web is known as Search Engine Marketing or Search Engine Placement. By strategically optimizing your website with targeted keywords and phrases, people who search for your type of product or service can be directed to you. The customers, then, are coming TO you by searching for what they have a need for.
Social media has opened up many exciting new doors for a company interested in Inbound Marketing. Establishing properly optimized Facebook Pages enables those who are interested in your product or service to find you and “like” your company. The beauty of this approach is that when friends of these folks are on Facebook, they may see a message saying something to the effect of, “Ed likes Target”, which accomplishes two things; first of all, by “liking” your company ‘Ed’ has essentially given your company a recommendation to everyone in his friend list. Secondly, by “liking” your business, ‘Ed’ has started the ball rolling on a nearly limitless increase in the number of people that interact with your company’s Facebook page daily. With 800 million active users, roughly half of which visit the site at least once a day, Facebook offers boundless direct interaction possibilities to the company that can harness it correctly. So with an estimated average of 120 friends, ‘Ed’ has, in one click, expanded your company’s online presence by 120 people, all of which could potentially do the same.
Twitter works in much the same way but has even more tools available to create inbound marketing streams. By mentioning what your product DOES and/or a trending topic that involves your service, members of the Twitter community can find and then follow your feed or tweets.
There are many other social media outlets we will be discussing in the coming weeks.
Stern is a Social Media Marketing Agency which helps clients establish brand recognition and increases revenue through Search Engine Positioning and Social Media Marketing.