There are many different ways to market your business, but they all essentially fall into two categories – inbound and outbound marketing. Both of these play an important role in the overall marketing of a business. It is important that you consider aspects of each of these when developing your marketing strategy. Marketing Strategy Consultants such as www.reallyhelpfulmarketing.co.uk/specialist-services/marketing-strategy-consultant/ can help with developing this strategy for you and they can also help with any implementation needs that you may have.
Inbound Marketing
The main aim of inbound marketing is to bring customers to the services and products that you offer. It is about capturing those people that are searching for the exact solutions that you offer, most of this will begin with searching online, whether through a Google search or looking on social media platforms. More than 63% of customers start their journey to buying products or services by looking online. This is why it is incredibly important to have some kind of online presence and a website is the most common method to achieve this.
Once you have your web presence sorted you can then start to add content to your site that helps your customers to see the benefits that your products and services have and how they can help them. There are lots of ways that you can do this including adding in-depth service pages to your site, writing a blog covering common topics in your industry and providing testimonials on your site from happy customers. All of this helps your customers to decide whether they want to continue on the buying journey with your business.
Outbound Marketing
This type of marketing has the sole purpose of getting a message out to as many people as possible in the hope that some of these will then turn into sales. This tends to be linked to the traditional marketing methods that most businesses will be aware of, and include direct mailings, newspapers ads and pay per click advertising. It is important that you consider what your return on investment could be for this kind of marketing.
The key benefit of outbound marketing is that it gets your marketing messages in front of people who may not otherwise have come across your brand, so it can bring you new customers that you can then convert into loyalty returning ones. People are also used to these kinds of adverts, so they are more likely to trust that they are genuine and will explore the information that is contained in them.
Both types of marketing have their merits and their challenges and it is important that you think about what mix of both inbound and outbound marketing will work for your business.