Inbound marketing is an approach that focuses on attracting leads, customers and visitors to you or your brand, rather than the more traditional approaches that outbound marketing advocates, such as cold calling, or paid advertising in traditional media.
Inbound marketing’s primary goal is focused on creating content that aligns well with an audience's interests, and interacting with people in a way that offers true value to them, for free, rather than using the traditional method of interruption marketing.
Inbound marketing uses some key tools in order to drive traffic and build a qualified audience.
These tools and platforms include:
The primary driving force behind inbound marketing is content creation, with an emphasis on creating valuable resources that solve a problem while building relationships through emotional connections by offering real value to prospects by aligning with the needs and interests of an audience.
The idea is to create content that satisfies a need, solves a problem, offers a unique perspective, or teaches something useful (is actionable).
In turn, qualifying your leads.
HubSpot describes the process as follows:
The first step is attraction.
This is the key difference between inbound marketing and other forms of marketing.
The goal of inbound marketing is to attract prospects/leads/visitors by creating content resources that align with their interests, rather than pushing a message on to a specific audience.
Inbound marketing, and content marketing specifically, when mixed with key SEO strategies has proven to be THE most effective form of marketing in the digital age.
