Part of the 999 Digital Marketing Tips Series
By Dave Ingalls
Digital Marketing Consultant
February 14, 2011
Link to main Inbound Marketing Web page
Digital Marketing Tip #6: Concentrate your Digital Marketing efforts on INBOUND DIGITAL MARKETING Techniques.
As you begin your Digital Marketing adventure, I strongly urge you to focus your Internet Marketing efforts on what has become known as INBOUND (DIGITAL) MARKETING.
What is inbound marketing and why emphasize it?
Inbound Digital Marketing is focused on:
1) Creating quality, useful content that addresses the needs of your audience and then “distributing” that content both on your Web site and on other Web properties that link back to your Web site,
2) Search engine optimization of that content so it can be easily found by those prospects actively looking for it via search engines like Google, and
3) Participating in the online “conversation” about your products or services via the use of online social media (for most B2B Marketers, this last point will be focused on blogging).
Why these techniques? Because the average sales prospect, whether B2B or B2C, is inundated with “Outbound Marketing” every waking hour of every day.
These outbound marketing techniques include trade shows, seminar series, email blasts to purchased lists, internal cold calling, outsourced telemarketing, and traditional advertising (TV, radio, printed media, etc.).
I like to call these outbound marketing techniques “Interruption Marketing” because that is what they attempt to do – interrupt a potential customer with your message while s/he is typically more focused on another topic.
The targeting of these interruptions is fairly sophisticated, but it is nevertheless an attempt to interrupt the prospect while that prospect is otherwise occupied.
Wouldn’t you, the Marketer, be more successful at getting your message heard if that message was positioned at the point when and where the prospect was LOOKING FOR IT!
And that is what Inbound Digital Marketing is all about – being found by prospects at exactly that point in time when they are looking for your products or services!
Want to learn more? The REAL experts on Inbound Marketing are the founders of HubSpot – here’s a link to a book they wrote discussing Inbound Marketing in detail: INBOUND MARKETING.