If you have yet to take advantage of online marketing, now is the time to do so. Gone are the days of selling your products and services only from a brick-and-mortar location. With the Internet so widely accessible to people all around the globe, it is time to market your company on a global level. If you don’t have a website, this is the first thing you should get to establish an online marketing platform. Also important to keep in mind is that your traditional marketing methods need to be integrated with inbound marketing strategies.
Don’t know what inbound marketing is? That’s fine. There are plenty of inbound marketing specialists who understand the ropes of this form of advertisement and can help walk you through integrating your traditional marketing methods with today’s top inbound tactics. Let’s take a closer look at inbound marketing and how to incorporate into your marketing agenda.
Understanding Inbound Marketing
To understand inbound marketing, you must first understand outbound (traditional) marketing. Outbound marketing takes place when businesses and advertisers push their ads out into the world, such as through TV commercials, radio ads, billboard messages, etc. Inbound marketing, however, attracts the attention of consumers on a more natural basis. Two of the most popular types of inbound marketing are social media marketing and content marketing. Most times, consumers themselves are searching for information when they come across inbound marketing. For example, a consumer is conducting research on the five best MCT oils and they come across this article; this is inbound content marketing at its finest.
Integrating Inbound and Traditional Marketing
The first thing you need to do when integrating today’s top inbound marketing methods with your traditional marketing is to not forget that the two go hand in hand with each other. Traditional marketing is still very effective and you should use it to drive your inbound marketing efforts. Take for example you set up at a trade show; this is traditional marketing. As you are educating consumers about your products, you will want to hand out business cards that have your company website and blog addresses on them; this is an excellent way to integrate inbound marketing with your traditional advertising methods.
Another way to incorporate inbound marketing with traditional marketing is by having your sales team create content. Sure, your sales team may not think they are good writers, but they can, in the least, answer questions relating to your products and have this content reviewed and edited by a professional writer. Who better to write content about your products other than your sales team? They understand the nitty-gritty details of your products and services, and this is the information consumers want to know. Also, keep in mind that inbound content marketing comes in many forms, not just blog articles and white papers. You can have your sales team create a five-minute video on one of your products and post this video to your website; this is one of the most popular and highly-effective forms of content marketing.
The Takeaway
If you ever hear that traditional marketing is dead, you seriously need to consider your source because this simply isn’t true. An effective and efficient marketing agenda is going to include both traditional and inbound marketing, and it is going to integrate the two with each other in a natural way.