In the 1989 Kevin Costner box office hit, Field of Dreams, the catchphrase "If you build it, he will come" was born. Even though the phrase preceded inbound marketing by 17 years, it effectively explained the overall outlook of the strategy. Simply put, if you build a site with lucrative content, the qualified sales leads will undoubtedly come.
Since 2006, inbound marketing has been the most lucrative form of online marketing. Inbound marketing is all about creating lucrative content that naturally attracts potential clients to your site. The object is to align the interests of your company and the content with the interests of your target market. By doing so you naturally provide your target audience with the information, they desire.
Inbound marketing is a far cry from the aggressive seek and find tactics of outbound marketing. Outbound marketing featured tactics such as buying email lists, cold calling, and praying for qualified sales leads. Today, marketing has gone through the revolution and marketers are living in the Field of Dreams because they are able to create exactly what qualified sales leads are searching for, and the qualified sales leads do indeed come.
Inbound marketing starts with qualified sales leads or visitors searching the web for a particular product or service. Previously, if a consumer needed a service or a product, they would simply whip out the Yellow Pages and search for the appropriate vendor. Today, an astonishing 89% of consumers turn to online search engines for information about products or services before they buy. This means that highly qualified sales leads are actually searching for a business they can trust.
As the first step in inbound marketing, you must attract these qualified sales leads by having your website properly optimized for search engines. As a result of search engine optimization (SEO), your website will have favorable position on the search engine results page, which is the page that displays the results from a user's web query. So don't forget to do reciprocal link checker. Once you have favorable position, you will find a large number of qualified sales leads are looking forward to finding you.
Once you have the qualified visitor on your site, you must offer them exactly what they came for. It would be a bad practice to advertise a website about fruit, but when the visitor clicks the link, the website is all about insurance. Instead, you must offer the same content that first attracted their attention. The content should be strictly informational because your qualified sales leads are looking to research a topic before they make a purchasing decision. If you come off too pushy or your content is too sales oriented, you run the risk of alienating your entire audience from the start.
In this step of inbound marketing, the goal is to convert those visitors into actual qualified sales leads. This is done by trading off something of value to your visitor in exchange for their information. Once you have their information, those visitors volunteer to be converted to qualified sales leads and to enter your sales cycle. In addition, once those visitors provide you with their contact information, they give you exclusive rights to contact and market material directly to them.
One of the most effective inbound marketing tools used to convert visitors to qualified sales leads is the landing page. The landing page is a web page with the sole purpose of funneling those visitors to conversion with an effective offer, call-to-action, and a form to capture the qualified sales leads' information.
Inbound marketing increases the number of qualified leads by nurturing the leads through the sales process. Instead of aggressively searching for customers, inbound marketing entails highly qualified sales leads finding you, which is every marketers' Field of Dreams.
Inspired by Mindy Weinstein
CEO / Market MindShift
Mindy is an SEO practitioner and trainer, as well as a marketing professor.
