If you spent any time in the last couple of years trying to grow your business, then you've probably come across a strategy called inbound marketing. Today I want to break down for you what exactly inbound marketing is and why the most successful financial services company in this next decade in 2020 and beyond are going to use inbound marketing to grow their business.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
I'm Samantha Russell from Twenty Over Ten and let's jump right in. So the first thing is let's talk about what inbound marketing is. There are a lot of definitions out there and people talking about it. But what does it really mean? I like to think of inbound marketing as being the exact opposite of outbound marketing, which is the old tried-and-true way that people used to market their business. So think of billboards, print ads, radio spots, the old kind of seminar dinners, or putting direct mail pieces in. It is outbound. So you are interrupting somebody's day and vying for their attention with information about your business in the hopes that they will stop what they're doing and pay attention and find your message compelling enough to interact with you.
If you think about it, that's a lot to ask, right? You're interrupting someone's day and you're hoping they're going to pay attention.Inbound marketing is the exact opposite. In inbound marketing, you create really compelling content that speaks directly to the type of information that the consumer you're trying to attract is already looking for answers to right. So they have problems or they have questions and they're searching for information on those problems or question and you're providing the answers and the information that they're looking for.So it's a business strategy that flips the script from you pushing your information out there on someone to them coming to you as a qualified customer looking for that information. And that is hugely hugely important - that idea that we're flipping it from us being a pushy salesperson going out and begging someone to pay attention to us to people knocking on our door and saying hello, you have great information, you're an expert in this area, please help me understand how to do these things better. And that's why inbound marketing is so so powerful.
Why Is Inbound Marketing Successful?
30 years ago inbound marketing didn't exist because it couldn't. We need the internet to put all this information at our fingertips and make it so that it's accessible to all. But with the advent of the internet and social media and email marketing and all these different strategies, what we found is that people have their guards up. And they don't want to have a salesperson calling them in the middle of the day or you know, read the direct mail pieces that come in. They're going to only trust it when they're going out there searching for the information themselves. And that is a really big important factor. So that is why inbound marketing is the way that the most successful advisory firms are right now and will continue to grow their business.
The base of all inbound marketing is a great content strategy. Content marketing is where you create this great content and information that you give out for free for anyone to access, and then that content can become the basis for everything else you do in your marketing strategy. For your videos, podcast, for any webinars that you give, for infographics you create, writing long-form editorial blog-style content, is the basis for everything else.So hopefully that's a great definition for you today of what inbound marketing is and how you can use it to grow your business is a topic that we have many other video tutorials on, so make sure you subscribe to Twenty Over Ten's YouTube channel and follow our blog for even more great tutorials and how-tos. Thanks, everyone.
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