What’s inbound Marketing, anyway?
What’s inbound marketing,anyway? Is it one of those new buzz words that you sometimes hear about? Not really. Inbound marketing is a strategy, and one key to business success in the 21st century.
Simply put, inbound marketing is attracting clients to you, and it’s done via an effective website, blog, and social media presence with informative and evolving content.
Is Inbound Marketing simply SEO Optimization?
SEO optimization is only part of an inbound marketing strategy. In fact, it’s only a small part, but a critical one. SEO optimization helps Google index your site, so it helps you to get found. Inbound marketing really begins once a user finds you. The whole concept of inbound marketing is engaging people, and the more people engaged, the larger pool of potential clients that will self-filter themselves in the direction of becoming actual clients.
Critical to engagement is good, interesting content. We’re not talking about page-stuffing with keywords meant for Google’s spiders to chew on. We’re talking about content for people. Honest to goodness people, who want to read something of value. Give them value and they’ll come back for more. Post it regularly and you have them engaged.
Google is making their spiders smarter all the time. Their engineers are constantly updating the algorithms to filter out the content intended to work the system. Google wants to index content with value, so if that’s what you provide, there’s no reason to worry.
Where Does Social Media Fit In?
Social media for business is still a young art, but we’re discovering it to be an extremely powerful tool for engaging potential customers. The same rules hold here. Post interesting content and engage your audience. What kind of content you post depends on the platform. On YouTube, short videos are the way to go. On Facebook, the human side of the company. On LinkedIn, the more technical aspects are appropriate.
So what’s inbound marketing? It’s engagement.
I’ll be talking more about these different platforms over the next few months, and the forthcoming podcast (that will appear in this blog) will have a lot more information, including some guests who are well-versed in the topics.
Until then, get out there and engage your audience. It takes time to build that audience, so what better time to start than right now?