Inbound Marketing

A New Way to Reach Out

The global marketing landscape is quietly undergoing a significant transformation due to recent technological trends. We believe this transformation will mandate a paradigm shift be embraced by your organization with respect to its marketing efforts in order to maximize your organization's visibility in the eyes of your target markets. And the sooner your organization acknowledges these trends and “retools” its marketing strategy, the better positioned you will be relative to your peers to reap the benefits afforded by these trends.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is simply marketing efforts designed to facilitate the discovery of your organization through your target market’s own Internet-related activities. This means instead of you finding your most qualified leads, fans, benefactors, etc., they will find you. Some of the key drivers of inbound marketing include social media use, Web 2.0 development frameworks, video-based content, search engine optimization efforts, RSS feeds, and webinars. The common denominator here is content, thus proving, once again, content truly is king for online visibility!

So what about all of those cold calls, broadcast media advertisements, direct mail campaigns, and spammy email messages still used by everybody else? Outbound marketing techniques such as these are becoming less effective due to behavioral changes in your target market brought on in large part by advancements in technology. The common denominator among these traditional methods used by organizations in an attempt to engage clients, prospects, fans, and benefactors is their interruptive nature. Cold calls interrupt your workday or family time, commercials interrupt your television and radio programming, and direct mail and spam interrupt your daily procedures.

But now, instead of permitting cold calls to interrupt my day, I can check caller ID and send the call to voice mail with a push of a button. I can even blacklist numbers using our virtual PBX platform. I can download apps to block all cold calls on my smartphone. And this is after I’ve registered with the various “do not call” registries, which dramatically reduces cold call volume. I find myself consuming less and less traditional broadcast media, instead, favoring the convenience and portability of using my mobile devices for media consumption and information aggregating. And when I do spend time in front of the television (generally accompanied by a phone or tablet), my DVR permits me to easily advance through all of the commercials. The direct mail I receive from unrecognized senders typically ends up in the recycle bin. And email filters eliminate email spam before it ever hits my inbox. Instead of forcing your marketing message onto your target audience, inbound marketing pulls members within your target audience to you, enabling them to consume your intended message on their terms and at their convenience.

Why We Prefer Inbound Over Outbound

In addition to the above-listed reasons, we prefer inbound marketing strategies because the Internet is a fantastic competition leveler. As long as your content is compelling, timely, and bundled in an easy-to-consume package, your inbound marketing strategies can enable your firm to compete on a level playing field with those firms possessing massive marketing budgets. Although an organization can persistently buy its first page Google search results placement, the fact is as many as 70 percent of the links clicked by online search users are organic links provided by the search results, not paid links according to MarketingSherpa. Finally! Your marketing results are rewarded based upon the quality of your content, not the size of your wallet.

Further, moving from a local or regional presence to a global presence can be easily accomplished by exploiting existing inbound marketing strategies. The scale of your organization is no longer limited by its geographical presence. Instead, your scalability essentially becomes limitless as soon as you embrace inbound marketing. For the vast majority of smaller organizations, this is incredibly empowering.

Listed below are key statistics that lend insight into the behavioral changes currently taking place within society in general:

• As of March 31, 2013, Facebook claims its user base has exceeded 1.1 billion individuals
• As of March 2013, Twitter processes 400 million tweets each day
• Analysts estimate Google Plus is adding 625,000 new users everyday
• According to Pew Research, retirees aged 65 and older now represent the fastest growing age group of social media users
• In May 2012, YouTube reported 72 hours of video content is uploaded to the site every minute
• In November 2011, Cisco reported 51 percent of all Internet traffic is video; and the company predicted within three years, 90 percent of all traffic will be video
• According to Forrester Research, publishing SEO video content on your website will give you a 53X better chance of landing a first page Google search results ranking
• 2011 global mobile data traffic was over 8X greater than the entire world’s Internet traffic in 2000
• Mobile video traffic is expected to grow at a CAGR of 90 percent through 2016
• Total mobile website traffic is doubling year over year
• The number of mobile-connected devices now exceeds the number of people on Earth
• Google handles nearly 115 billion online searches each month

Here’s what we take away from that list of facts:

More people continue to use multiple social media sites, everyone now has an Internet connected mobile device and people are using them to search for online content, people are consuming vast amounts of video content apart from traditional broadcast media channels, and search engines are perfectly content to serve that video content up on a platter to those who search for it.

At the beginning of this discussion, I said the global marketing landscape is “quietly” undergoing this transformation from focusing solely on traditional, outbound-centric, marketing campaigns to incorporating inbound-centric strategies. Clearly, inbound marketing calls into question the relevancy of most marketing firms that continue to rely on traditional marketing methods. The more nimble and tech-savvy marketers have already embraced this paradigm shift while many traditional agencies continue to tread down familiar paths. Echoing this sentiment is Craig Davis, former global chief creative officer for J. Walter Thompson, the world’s fourth largest ad agency:

"Audiences everywhere are tough. They don’t have time to be bored or brow beaten by orthodox, old-fashioned advertising. We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in."

At CenterStage Media, we help your organization extend the reach of its branding efforts using all forms of marketing techniques - including inbound marketing - by creating and distributing all forms of media across all available online platforms. We develop and maintain your web presence using Web 2.0 design principles. And we integrate your content with various social media networks designed to leverage the social networking capabilities inherent in those platforms. Contact us today to hear how our media production and marketing strategies can help your organization rise above the fray and increase its visibility!

About Aaron J. Courtney

Aaron J. Courtney is the Director of Technical Production at CenterStage Media. He brings media production, marketing, web development, and graphic design skillsets to the firm. He began working with film cameras at age nine and has served in various media post production capacities for over 15 years. Connect with him on Google+ and LinkedIn and follow CenterStage on Twitter and Google+.

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