Businesses are getting smarter.  Expensive traditional marketing and lead generation techniques have had a face lift.  A growing trend to drive clients your way is inbound content marketing.

Creating web pages with useful and quality information is the essential key when considering inbound content marketing.  You want to be the place that people look to for answers to questions, solutions to problems, creative approaches, and current trends.  The more quality information provided, the better this marketing technique will aid your business in the future.

With advertising becoming increasingly more expensive and ROI sometimes being difficult to measure, inbound content marketing ensures that the people searching for your products or services are the ones that benefit from the time, money, and energy put forth.  Inbound content marketing is also relatively inexpensive if you know your market and the needs of the client base.  Ultimately, the goal is to bring interested parties to your business website instead of wasting effort running after the masses.

In this report, The State of Inbound Marketing, businesses were surveyed regarding their current ROI from various strategies that were being incorporated.  Here are some of their findings:

• Inbound marketing channels are maintaining their low-cost advantage: Inbound marketing-dominated organizations experience a cost per lead 62% lower than outbound marketing-dominated organizations.
• The gap between spending on inbound vs. outbound continues to widen: In 2009, inbound marketing had a 9% greater share of the lead generation budget; in 2011 its share was 17% greater.
• Blogs and social media channels are generating real customers: 57% of companies using blogs reported that they acquired customers from leads generated directly from their blog.
• More and more business are blogging: Businesses are now in the minority if they do not blog. From 2009 to 2011 the percentage of businesses with a blog grew from 48% to 65%.
• Businesses are increasingly aware their blog is highly valuable: 85% of businesses rated their company blogs as “useful,” “important” or “critical;” a whopping 27% rated their company blog as “critical” to their business.

As you can see, the concept of blogging is being utilized regularly by a staggering amount of businesses with an online presence.  Most business blogs are tailored to the industry and address concerns and questions faced by day to day clients.  Again, knowing your market and client base is crucial.

Gaining a true understanding of issues faced by current as well as potential clients will help you in creating quality content.  Huge amounts of marketing research is not necessary here.  The perfect place to start is with general questions or comments your company deals with from your existing clients everyday.  Surely, several various areas of subject matter can be discussed.  Writing a concise, well-worded post or article about the issue is all it takes.  Make it as professional in nature that is appropriate for your client base; for example, if your customers are mechanics, then you may have a different tone than if you deal with high-powered attorneys everyday.  You’ll know your audience.  Trust yourself, write conversationally, and that’s it.  Valuable pieces of information ready for your blog or business website can be created easily, and these informational pieces can then be used to generate traffic from all over the web.

As one can see, this marketing technique is the wave of the future.  But, if the concept of inbound content marketing is a confusing one, or if you’re still unsure of the level of quality and usefulness of your current content, then contact us now.  Accendo Digital can help you take control of your marketing today.