Marketing

10 Reasons Why Inbound Marketing is Even More Important in 2021 & Beyond

Interruptive advertising, broadcast marketing, pushing your messaging, making an initial contact regardless of interest level, and hoping it resonates. At its best, outbound marketing is disruptive – more often, annoying. To break through, advertising is becoming more intrusive, pervasive, and in many instances obnoxious.

In 2021 and beyond, it’s time to stop shouting at your potential and future customers and start facilitating by providing the relevant and value-added content your customers are seeking.

In 2006, the President of the marketing firm, Yankelovich, estimated that the average consumer was exposed to 5,000 ads per day. Today, digital marketing experts estimate there may be as many as 10,000 marketing interruptions every day. There is more advertising, new tactics, expanded platforms, retargeting, embedded videos, and pop-up ads.

Consider that in 2007 Google ad revenues were $10.5 billion, in 2020 $147 billion, and that Google, although the market leader has less than a 30% share of digital advertising revenues.

Rather than blasting a message to those attempting to block your efforts with caller ID, spam filtering, Netflix, or ad blockers, we recommend a strategy where you help yourself be discovered by the people already interested and shopping in your industry.

Enter inbound marketing, a methodology that focuses on creating reasons for the customer to come to you.

Inbound Marketing in 2021 and Beyond

Especially for the businessperson, time and attention are essential resources that they value and protect. They have little interest in unsolicited interruptions intruding on these resources. They do, however, have business issues, needs, questions, and pain points and appreciate content and experiences tailored to address them. The appropriately curated content and social media tactics can become an effective method to build brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, and convert that traffic into leads and revenue.

Inbound strategies are designed to engage an audience of people you can more easily qualify as a prospect or lead and convert to a customer. This article reviews ten significant benefits of building meaningful, enduring relationships with prospects and potential customers in 2021 and beyond.

1. Inbound Outperforms Outbound Marketing

Inbound marketing delivers better, more qualified leads at a lower acquisition cost than outbound strategies. Undoubtedly, outbound advertising may always have a place for brand exposure and a share of the budget, but savvy marketers are turning to inbound to accelerate business growth and development.

Inbound marketing’s effectiveness is due to providing your customer the specific information/answers they are seeking at the precise moment they need it. That combination builds trust, helps establish you as the authority in your field, and leads to lasting relationships.

Outbound marketing is performed with a megaphone, whereas inbound works like a magnet.

2. Inbound Marketing Helps You to Attract, Engage, and Delight Your Customers

An inbound marketing strategy is designed to help you attract people to your company through content, engage and impress them with helpful solutions, and delight them with individualized communication. Your content, including blogs, social media, white papers, should provide real value to prospective customers, addressing their problems and pain points, illustrating you understand their issues. An effective inbound campaign promotes solutions versus products.

Once your content draws your ideal customer to your site and they share their information, your team can engage and delight them with additional tailored content and personalized responses to any questions.

3. Inbound Marketing Delivers Qualified Leads

In outbound marketing, you are casting a wider net, seeking customers, approaching many people who have little or no interest in your product or services. The content in an inbound strategy ensures that those coming to your site are interested in what you are offering. Your content builds awareness, offers solutions, establishes your expertise, and leads to relationships with the right prospects.

4. Inbound Addresses Each Stage of Your Buyer’s Journey

Your inbound strategy should consider each stage of your buyer’s decision process when evaluating your product or service:

  • Creating awareness – attracting your buyer’s favorable attention.
  • Consideration – establishing that you understand their needs and issues.
  • Decision – illustrating how your product or service is the appropriate solution.

Developing helpful content that addresses each stage of the process at the right time ensures a smooth flow through the sales funnel, leading to positive results.

5. Inbound Marketing Delivers a Better Customer Experience

Outbound marketing’s interruptive approach is just as likely to annoy your potential customer as provide any real value. With inbound, your goal is to be helpful, identify issues and needs, and provide solutions. Which seems more likely to attract your ideal customer and provide a better, more personal customer experience? Customers who benefit from inbound marketing’s approach tend to be more satisfied and brand loyal.

6. Inbound Marketing is a More Efficient Approach

Just as time and attention are essential resources for your potential customer, along with the budget, they are among your most valued commodities. Inbound marketing’s assets, once developed, can be used in a variety of ways; on your website, as blogs, white papers, infographics, in emails, and e-books. They can be reposted, updated, and amended for other uses. In addition, there are various tools and software that can be employed to allow you to automate different inbound functions.

Perhaps most importantly, the leads delivered through inbound marketing have already expressed an interest in your product or service. As opposed to generic messages delivered to disinterested parties, inbound helps you attract your best leads. This saves time and attention for your sales team in disqualifying poorly suited prospects.

Qualified leads are far more likely to become prospects and ultimately customers.

7. Inbound is Ideal for Integrated Campaigns

Once your voice and message are proven effective in attracting and engaging your ideal customer, they can be woven into your content across various platforms and in different stages of the buying journey.

The most productive inbound campaigns convey the same powerful messaging in blogs, social media, podcasts, press releases, emails, and sales materials. Additionally, personalized communications during the sales process are tailored to deliver the consistent overarching theme.

8. Inbound Marketing is More Cost-Effective

Since inbound is primarily online marketing, it can be far more cost-effective than other mediums such as TV, radio, or print. For start-ups or smaller companies, inbound can be scaled as you grow. As opposed to outbound, you own the assets you develop today, which will still generate leads in the future, albeit at a declining rate. In outbound, you are, in effect, renting the space where your advertising is featured. When you stop paying the rent, there are no further leads.

With the magnet approach of inbound, those coming to your site are interested in your product or service being offered – making them better-qualified leads and prospects than those generated in an outbound campaign.

9. Inbound Delivers a Better Return on Investment

The combined benefits of inbound such as cost-effectiveness, efficiency, lead quality and owned versus rented assets, result in a better return on investment for your marketing spend.

Most marketing experts agree that inbound is a far better investment in time and money. Many inbound strategies can be executed at minimal or no cost. Inbound metrics are measurable. How many visits to your site, how long did customers spend on specific pages/articles, how many leads were converted to prospects and customers, and at what cost. Changes to your messaging for greater efficacy can be done quickly and again at little to no cost – all leading to a lower cost per quality lead, prospect, and eventual customer than outbound.

10. Inbound Marketing is Measurable and Flexible

Monitoring results, being flexible and adaptable are essential elements of inbound marketing. As with any marketing, monitoring and measuring results, then adapting and improving your message is key. For example, how is your content performing in generating leads, conversions, and closing prospects? Which areas need improvement? What content is resonating, and which is missing the mark?

Preset goals and objectives provide the benchmarks. Underperforming assets can be edited, modified, and tested to improve your campaign.

In Summary

As illustrated, inbound marketing, when executed correctly, can be incredibly effective in driving the right traffic to your company’s website. However, developing inbound strategies and compelling content tailored to your audience is not without certain challenges. If you’re interested in solutions to these challenges, Revenue-Inc. is the B2B SaaS Marketing Agency that can help you – “execution and results guaranteed.”