How to Prove the Value of Inbound Marketing to your CMO

Inbound marketing has become a buzzword and an upcoming trend to talk among marketers for building an effective marketing strategy. It is a form of marketing which empowers potential customers by generating the content that resonates with the readers. Inbound marketing uses strategies in a way so that a company is visible to its clients. So instead of them going out and hunting customers, the customers discover them. For organisations looking to up the ante in their sales, inbound marketing can be a great solution. Companies that follow the inbound marketing strategy have been shown to be 4x more efficient in driving revenue and hitting sales goals.

Inbound marketing focuses a lot on nurturing leads. It is a customer-centric approach which attracts people through the integrated use of content marketing, search engine optimisation and social media marketing.

Content Marketing: It is used massively in the industry to engage the larger audience. The digital media has widened the scope of content marketing, and even the range of users has also increased. The audience has become very interactive and wants fresh and accurate information. Content Marketing is not limited to blogging but various other creative areas as well. Videos and images have played a great role in generating traffic, as they are interesting and appealing to the viewers.

Search Engine Optimisation: SEO is a strategy to maximise the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine. It is an organic process of generating leads through the results on the search engine. SEO gives the link to the related websites as per the keywords typed by the users (depending upon the high-quality content of the site). Though SEO and Content Marketing are two different approaches, they are meant to work together; after all, SEO creates the demand for keywords and content.

Social Media Marketing: It is an important pillar which has taken its fair share of hits, but it remains one of the most effective strategies for generating visibility. Throw your content into syndication and the followers will have more reason to stick around. Social media can generate a steady traffic to your site and build your brand credibility. Lead generation through social media platforms is fast, efficient and a relatively inexpensive way to drive traffic to the website

Inbound takes time, expertise and resources to be implemented correctly. Here are some ideas on how to showcase the value of inbound to your CMO.

Some Ideas to Showcase the Value of Inbound to Your CMO

ROI of Inbound Marketing

Outbound marketing methods such as print advertising and direct mail do make it difficult for any business to calculate the ROI. Inbound gives an easier measure of your marketing performance to single out the efforts that need to be improved in various other business functions which are not performing. The ROI of inbound marketing is a lot higher than that of outbound. It is cost-effective, and the effectiveness and efficiency of the efforts are increased, leading to higher profits.

Content Assets

When explaining inbound to your CMO, the inbound content becomes inbound assets. The major focus of content marketing is to engage the audience by using information and creating content in such a manner that would drive more traffic to the site and help to change the consumer behaviour that could lead to better sales. It continues to drive traffic from social channels and SEO long after it has been published, without any additional investment.

Improves Customer Relations

Inbound marketing strives to provide high-quality content to their potential buyers to gain more insights from them and to be of value to them. It focuses on the long-term relationship between the consumer and the business. The main idea is to improve customer-business relations, and as a result, it improves the brand’s credibility, sales, reach and helps in generating new leads. By simply offering customer-centric content and services to the readers, it will contribute to improving brand credibility. This strategy can develop and improve the brand loyalty of the customers.

Retention Rate And Quality Leads

The people who generate traffic on the website are the actual people who are interested in your content. The retention rate in inbound marketing is more, as compared to outbound marketing as only the concerned ones take the effort of filling up a subscription form.

Inbound v/s Pay-per-click

Pay per Click is the concept available on many internet marketing platforms like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. where you market your advertisements on these platforms and pay for every click that your prospective clients (viewers) make on these ads. It offers an immediate ROI in comparison to inbound strategy.

But it is equivalent to renting space on someone else’s website, with which you are already competing on the digital platform. As a result, it doesn't lead to a long-term effect on the customers, whereas inbound marketing compels the potential customer to reach your website and build long-term relations. Therefore, Inbound is a more practical approach to implement.

To summarise, instead of outbound marketing methods of purchasing ads, buying email list or hunting down the leads, inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content. By publishing useful and accurate content and optimizing it according to your target persona, the potential customer reaches automatically to the website. So, therefore, the output of that content becomes educational and relevant instead of being interruptive.

Inbound Marketing can be an analysed source which can grow its trend in the future. Many companies still believe that traditional or outbound marketing maintains better leads for the sales. One can use both the marketing techniques creatively to improve the overall chance of landing leads with a higher potential.

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