In case you’ve missed it, marketing geniuses are now touting the value and benefits of inbound marketing, adding that outbound marketing is now a waste of time.
Everywhere you look for tips on how to generate more traffic and convert visitors into buyers, you’ll find a self-proclaimed expert – who may or may not actually have credentials as one – discussing all the advantages of this marketing strategy.
Before going any further, it is important to know that those who have been in the virtual marketing business for more than five years have been using each of these techniques for every customer’s website all along. The grown up marketers call it – da-dah! “Online marketing”.
The Change in Marketing
There are two elements to marketing your website and they can be differentiated by using the terms “inbound” and “outbound”. In the first, you attract people to your site and they become interested, sign up for a weekly newsletter or email notification and provide customers with an extraordinary experience that makes them want to return often.
In the latter, you are engaging those who signed up for your newsletter or purchased one of your products or services by reaching out to them by email, information about your latest blog post or article that may interest them and send notices of seminars, webinars or special sales.
There has been a change in the way that all marketing is approached now. Whether the changes have occurred because the consumer is wise to the “I am great” strategy where businesses tell you all about their mission, what they do and what they offer or because some smart marketer suddenly realized that people are by nature ego-centric, no one claims to know.
Wesley Yuhn suggests adding strategies that are not used quite as much at a particular time as a method of keeping your website unique. In addition, as CSO of ACH Direct Processing, Mr. Yuhn has discovered that sites offering lending experiences are often faced with growing mistrust because they have failed to do enough to establish trust with consumers.
Using Inbound Marketing to Build Trust
Generating trust is a major purpose when developing an inbound strategy. It’s important that every article amplifies your company image and is related to your products and services.
To do this, you must:
- Have a blog and post at least twice a week to it
- Join Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ posting to each of these once a day
- Be ready to answer questions when asked on your social accounts, share interesting comments, resolve any problems that arise immediately and post that resolution under the complaint instantly and retweet tidbits as they come in
- If you are a one person operation, hire writers or content marketing companies to handle all the writing and posting instead of driving yourself crazy
Today, instead of talking about how wise your business is, you now have to figure out what makes your customers special. But, that is not enough any longer, either.
In one of Wesley Yuhn reviews of websites that are utilizing only the inbound strategy, he noted that just getting people to your website is not enough to call that a “potential” customer or “potential” lead. As the CEO of Media Oasis, he has had the opportunity to discover flaws in many business websites.
