The Tools for Delivery

Challenges of a Marketing Manager

Inbound marketing is a set of marketing strategies and techniques that focuses on drawing relevant prospects and clients towards a business and its products or services. Marketers who use the inbound method offer information and resources that are designed to attract potential customers during the time that they are actively searching for a specific solution to whatever their problem may be. The purpose of providing this information is to encourage prospects to engage your company and begin a dialogue.

This new approach to marketing works in tune with the way consumers actually make purchasing decisions: by using Internet search, online blogs, and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to learn about products and services before they buy them.

Inbound marketing requires three distinct skills:

1. The ability to write compelling content that attracts customers to your business. This content has to be useful to customers, and not just a promotional message.
 
2. The capability to distribute that content so that it is easily found by prospective customers using search engines, which requires a sophisticated understanding of search engine optimization.
 
3. The capacity to attract and engage a community of followers who interact with content, add their thoughts to it in an ongoing dialogue, and disseminate it to others.
 

Instead of disturbing their prospects with intrusive ads, inbound marketing practitioners create content that people really want to see. Instead of purchasing advertising space in a newspaper, they create their own blog that people will want to read. Instead of cold calling, they design helpful tools, so that people call them looking for more information. Instead of shouting their message into a crowd over and over again, they attract highly qualified customers to their business like bees to honey.

Because of its greater efficiency, and much lower costs, inbound marketing enables technology startup companies to compete with larger businesses in huge industries like IT. Smaller organizations have already realized that inbound marketing will level the playing field, and are altering their marketing budgets to more aggressively allocate funds to their inbound strategy.