a new generation

Inbound Marketing just makes sense.

Most students graduating college with a marketing or advertising degree know the in’s and out’s of traditional outbound marketing theories, but they are outdated techniques today. During my college career I always sat in class wondering why companies bothered with mass television or direct mail campaigns if the response rates were hard to track or very low. It just did not make sense!

Upon graduation I have been studying all about inbound marketing, and love it. Today, virtually everything is online. Therefore, business must be online too. Think of the last time you waited around to hear about a product on a television ad or in a magazine. Instead, I bet you are looking up product features on Google, Facebook’ing friends to ask for their suggestions, or going to YouTube to find a product demonstration. This is because the Internet allows all types of information to be available at our fingertips 24/7.

Why inbound marketing?
Advertising online is a lot cheaper and highly targeted.
Being on Twitter and Facebook is free (aside from time and personnel needed to work on updating it)
Uploading videos on YouTube is free
Creating a quality website is comparatively inexpensive
Developing a ning community for your target market is inexpensive as well

It only makes sense to employ inbound marketing techniques for your business today! If your consumers are online, you must be as well. Plain and simple. Our economy has changed dramatically in the past decade. Ten years ago, television, radio, and magazines were highly effective because people were tuning in and did not know how to block out traditional advertisements. Today, we have TiVo, iPods, Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s new iPad, and now the boom of Internet business.

It is also very easy to track your progress online. Google Analytics is a free way to track visits, traffic sources, and page effectiveness on your website. A new start up, HubSpot (located in Cambridge, MA) has their own excellent program to track leads and conversion on all of your sites, even social media sites. These tracking devices are much more precise than traditional ways of measuring results on television or radio.

A great resource to learn all the critical basics of inbound marketing is Inbound Marketing by Hubspot’s founders, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. To read my most important takeaway’s from this book, please see my recent blog about it. HubSpot also has developed an Inbound Marketing University which I am taking right now.

Is your company currently using inbound marketing techniques. If not, why not?

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