Unlike how it was in the past, marketing has changed dramatically over the years. Although traditional marketing still exists and is very important to the overall process, inbound marketing is essential at this point and pairing it with your increased reputation is a natural choice.
Having a fresh, novel approach to marketing
With traditional marketing, you have to go after your customers. You have to educate them about what they want and need and you have to convince them that you have what they cannot live without. That often involves a lot of interrupting and it often leaves the customer (or potential customer) feeling irritated and put upon. On the other hand, more modern marketing (inbound marketing) takes the opposite approach in many ways. First of all, with inbound marketing, you don’t go after your customers and potential customers. You get your customers to come to you. Because of that approach, those customers and potential customers are prescreened and prequalified. You don’t have any need to twist their arms. They come to you willingly and happily.
Another positive feature of inbound marketing is that you will not have to eat up most of your budget to accomplish your goals. Inbound marketing costs very little. With traditional marketing, in all likelihood, you would have been forced to spend a great deal of money in order to accomplish what you set out to do. Because of that, if you owned a small or even medium-size company, you would have had a difficult time competing with larger companies from a marketing perspective. Of course, what follows that is your professional reputation. The more successful you are at causing a stir and getting people to know you and to eventually buy your offerings (after they have believed in your credibility, trustworthiness, and expertise), the better your professional reputation will become.
Marketing to the appropriate people
When it comes to your marketing efforts for your business, it is important to choose the most appropriate target audience possible. Your target audience must be interested in what you have to say and in what you can do for them. They must also want to be in the market to buy what you are selling and to feel that you are the best person from whom to buy that particular product and/or service. Additionally, the usual traditional (outbound) marketing approach may no longer work for you. Another thing to keep in mind is the fact that when it comes to outbound marketing efforts, the target audience has gotten very clever about thwarting your efforts. They can block your advertisements, they can put themselves on a “Do Not Call” list, etc. In other words, they have ways of avoiding you entirely.
On the other hand, inbound marketing can be extremely effective and, if you do it correctly, your target audience members may not even be aware that you are trying to sell them anything at all (not even at some point in the future). When it comes to inbound marketing, the approach that the technique takes is concentrating on drawing people, converting prospects to eventual customers, closing the sale, and satisfying those customers on a long-term (or permanent) basis. Inbound marketing creates solid, enduring relationships that last for very long time and are mutually beneficial. Those relationships create a very positive feeling between the other people and you. Again, along with successfully marketing your brand, your reputation will also get a boost and it will become stronger and stronger. Inbound marketing will general more online traffic, it will create new leads, and it will allow you to ultimately increase your revenue.
How do you ensure that your inbound marketing campaign is successful?
The best way to ensure that your inbound marketing campaign is successful is by writing and posting top-notch content. You want to share content that is well written, innovative, insightful, and amazing to the point where other people feel compelled to share it with people they know and trust. If your content was done correctly, it will answer all of your target audience’s questions (even the ones that they haven’t asked yet). In fact, you want them to seek the answers automatically from you. If you can get them to that point, you will be good to go.
Making loyal customers from target audience members
When it comes to the nature and approach of inbound marketing, it is important to understand that the relationship and interactions between human beings is at the heart of it. Your target audience members are critical to your professional success; however, on some level, it is even more critical that you create loyal customers who will stick with you for a very long time to come. If you can create brand champions, you won’t have anything to worry about.
Conclusion
Using inbound marketing to help boost your professional reputation is a brilliant thing to do. Inbound marketing is a proven, successful, intelligent approach to marketing your brand. It is very easy to learn how to use it and it is extremely effective. You will start to see positive results within a relatively short amount of time. Outbound marketing is an approach that interrupts the target audience members to get your point across. It is a hard approach and, although it works well when paired with inbound marketing, it often doesn’t work so well by itself. On the other hand, inbound marketing has tremendous benefits for everyone involved (on both sides of the fence).
Michael Cohn is the founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of CompuKol Communications. He has over 25 years of experience in IT and web technologies. Mr. Cohn spent a significant amount of time at a major telecommunications company, where his main focus was on initiating and leading synergy efforts across all business units by dramatically improving efficiency, online collaboration, and the company’s Intranet capabilities, which accelerated gains in business productivity. He also reduced company travel and travel costs by introducing and implementing various collaboration technologies.
His expertise includes business analysis; project management; management of global cross-matrix teams; systems engineering and analysis, architecture, prototyping and integration; technology evaluation and assessment; systems development; performance evaluation; and management of off-shore development.
Mr. Cohn earned a Master’s degree in project management from George Washington University in Washington, DC; and a Master’s degree in computer science and a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, NJ.
