The Marketing Sweet Spot: Inbound And Outbound
Courtesy
Martin Lieberman is senior content manager for ConnectedView, an online marketing company in Marlborough that offers an all-in-one solution with email marketing, social media, online survey, and website analytics functionality. For more information, visit www.connectedview.com or follow @connectedview on Twitter.
It wasn't long ago that marketers were screaming from the rooftops about their new favorite duo: Email marketing and social media.
They're like peanut butter and jelly! Peas and carrots! Batman and Robin!
Indeed, the marketing duo was effective. But fast forward a couple years, and the fact that email and social media go together is old news.
Now there's a new favorite marketing pair: Outbound and inbound. If you're not already thinking about your marketing activities in the context of outbound and inbound, you probably can't properly assess your marketing strategy.
Defining the Terms
Most of the marketing you do now is probably of the outbound variety. Email, social media and online surveys are all outbound communications. Some call them "push" messaging, because in essence, you're pushing information at your readers (i.e., your Facebook fans, Twitter followers and email subscribers).
There's a good reason for you to be marketing this way: It works. Email continues to be a reliable workhorse, bringing in approximately $40 for every $1 spent, according to a 2011 study by the Direct Marketing Association. And in a recent J.D. Power and Associates study, 87% of people said online social interaction with a company "positively impacted" their likelihood to buy something.
Inbound marketing
But that's only half of the equation. If outbound communications are the best way to convert customers you already know, inbound marketing is the best way to reach those people you don't know, and who don't know you ... yet.
Inbound marketing is a catch-all term for the activities that increase the web traffic that comes your way "organically" — without you having to go out and find it. It includes things like blogging and search-engine optimization (SEO).
When you use the right keywords on your website and write blog posts about topics people want to learn about, you increase the likelihood that search engines will find your site when users go looking for your products and services.
Hitting The Sweet Spot
If you're already sending customer emails, have an active social presence, and you're blogging too — that's great. But you should be integrating these two strategies to know how well they're really working.
You may know the open rate of your emails, but do you know what effect your email and social campaigns have on driving traffic to your website? Do you know how many people who read your emails come back to your site a day or two later — unprompted by you — to make a purchase?
Making those kinds of connections can help you to focus your marketing on certain areas, demographics, products, services or marketing activities.
To get a fuller picture of how well your marketing campaigns are working, you can use Google Analytics, a resource that tells you a bit about your web traffic. It's free, but it takes some time to learn.
Or you can purchase do-it-yourself software like ConnectedView, which lets you send an email campaign or survey and track the effect it has on your website traffic right away and in the days and weeks after, allowing you to follow up with those people who show serious interest in your products and services.
Capitalizing on the connection between inbound and outbound will put you and your business right in the new marketing sweet spot.
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments