Inbound Marketing
What is Inbound Marketing?
Lets say you are planning a trip to visit beautiful Vancouver British Columbia. Specifically, you plan on crossing the Georgia Straight over to North Vancouver, where you intend to hit the infamous North Shore Mountains to ride the renowned mountain biking trails. The only problem you have is, you’ve never ridden anything remotely similar to the trails on the Shore, and you’ve decided to seek out some help. You turn to the first place most people do nowadays, a search engine.
Into the search box, you type a query to find the answer you need, North Vancouver Mountain Bike Lessons. The first website that pops up in the search results is the link you click. You hit the site and browse the information, the programs offered, the testimonials, and decide to contact them to sign up for some lessons.
This is an example of Inbound Marketing. The website at the top of that search just earned a sale or booking without having to ask for it. The personal intent of taking a mountain biking lesson in North Vancouver, and seeking out where to take that lesson, drove the sale.
As the name implies, Inbound Marketing essentially means, a marketing strategy, of being found by your customers. Your customers seek you out, through content you’ve written, white papers, videos or eBooks, using a search engine or social media. You can think of Outbound Marketing, its polar opposite, as a door-to-door salesman, or billboard ad along side the highway and other “look at me!” types of marketing.
Over the last 11 years, Relentless has helped deliver literally hundreds of millions of visitors to our client’s websites through search, social and other inbound means, from all over the world. We’ve helped countless clients strategize as to which content is the most appropriate and relevant, developed campaigns to target specific geographical areas, produced industry videos, and then analyzed the results to refine and improve the efforts.
The Right Content, For The Right People
Creating compelling content is crucial to a search marketing campaign. In order to create compelling content, a firm understanding of the intended audience needs to be in place. We’ve worked with some pretty outstanding companies over the years, all with the goal of positioning our clients as an authority in their industry. We help research demographic personas to find out exactly who we are marketing to, followed by extensive keyword research, segmented by geographic areas to find where we want to focus our efforts on.
Once we have a better understanding of who we are marketing for, and where the demand for this type of content is, we help develop the basis for content creation. Working with our client’s communications departments, we analyze content based on semantic relationships, and consult on this content with the aim of providing greater visibility in the search engines. We do this by ensuring that our clients are delivering clear data (content) to the search engines, in an optimized way (SEO), and then by providing this data with authority, through links and social media citations.
Providing What The People Want
We’ve become inundated with thousands of outbound marketing ads interrupting our lives everyday. From television ads to billboards, the amount of totally non-relevant ads we see each day is astounding. There is research to show how we subconsciously tune out and ignore these ads, and we’re even actively turning them off through TiVo, spam filtering, and caller ID. People are using the Internet to do their own research, to find the right products and services that suit them uniquely. We as marketers need to meet them there.
If you are interesting in content development strategies, or market research for your industry, please feel free to contact us.
Posted on: 07/13/2011
Updated on: 08/15/2017
Posted by: Craig Hauptman – President & Founder
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