Top Reasons Inbound Marketing Is Crucial to Your Small Businesses Success

Inbound marketing is defined as a business strategy that attracts customers to your brand through the use of valuable content. Think of all those helpful gift guides, infographics, and buyer’s guides you’ve used to help inform your big purchases—they all count as inbound marketing content. Though blogging is perhaps the most common tool leveraged in this methodology, content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media marketing can also fall under the inbound umbrella.

The fact of the matter is that content appeals to every type of buyer at every phase of the buyer’s journey. As a result, a well-crafted content strategy can serve a wide range of marketing goals, including boosting conversion rates, raising brand awareness, improving brand reputation, growing social media following, increasing revenue, and beyond. If you’re new to inbound marketing, let us go over some of the top reasons why this marketing style is crucial to your business’s success, even if you’re just starting out.

1. It Improves SEO Rankings

According to HubSpot’s 2018 State of Inbound Report, growing search rankings is a top priority among most businesses (PDF), with SEO beating out all other listed marketing goals. And here’s the thing: Inbound marketing is great for SEO. Why? It all has to do with giving Google what it wants—high-quality, original, and useful content. Google has prioritized user-friendliness above all else, and one of the primary purposes of inbound marketing is to answer the questions of the user. Therefore, if your website has good content, it’s more likely to rank at the top of the search results page.

2. It Works with Your Content Marketing Program

One part of inbound marketing is content creation. Affiliates, such as influencers, bloggers, and publishers, create their own original high-quality content in order to promote a company’s product or service. It also helps with affiliate programs. Affiliates produce everything from long-form views to promotional social media posts, with clicks and purchases earning them commissions along the way. This type of digital marketing can help your SEO rankings in two ways: through original, useful content, as mentioned above, and by providing your company with backlinks that signal to Google that you’re worthy of ranking high.

3. It Has High ROI

Here’s one of the best things about inbound marketing: If you create your own content, it doesn’t cost you a thing. Unlike paid ads or other types of traditional outbound marketing, inbound marketing costs nothing to publish, and you don’t have to pay more for extra views and clicks. In fact, even when you use affiliate marketing to grow your business, you only pay for the sales and leads you actually generate. The result is a super-effective strategy with a huge return on investment (ROI).

4. It Educates and Engages

Sometimes when we’re staring down the analytics rabbit hole and thinking hyper-strategically, we forget the fundamental purpose of this type of marketing—to educate and engage potential customers. A good inbound marketing strategy involves creating content for consumers at every stage in the buyer’s journey. Informational posts, FAQs pages, and buyer’s guides can be really helpful at this point in the journey, which ultimately can boost your website’s SEO rankings.

5. It Helps You Build Your Brand

Posts on your blog, social media pages, and website are most likely the primary way your consumer interacts with your brand. So, naturally, it’s the best place to set forth a strong brand identity. Having a clear brand voice is important when you want to attract a certain demographic or when you want to humanize your company. It helps build trust and brand recognition. You can also use inbound marketing to help promote certain values and ethics of your brand.

6. It Grows Your Audience

Everybody loves to share a good piece of content, especially if it’s funny, interesting, or otherwise engaging. What inbound marketing does is create loads of shareable content that users want to pass along to their friends on social media and, to a lesser extent, via e-mail. The result, of course, is more fans and followers. Certain types of content are more likely to garner more attention and help grow your audience, so you’ve got to be strategic with the type you choose to leverage.

7. It Promotes Your Product or Service

Your inbound strategy can seriously help you boost sales and promote your products, especially if you’re using the right types of inbound content. For example, product videos reportedly help increase purchases by 144 percent, as four in five consumers consider demo videos helpful.

Though your inbound marketing strategy shouldn’t be entirely promotional, you can and should use your content to sell the benefits of your product. Partnering with an affiliate marketer is also a great way to promote your product or service through inbound, as it serves as a sort of word-of-mouth referral for checking out your company.

It Boosts Conversion Rates

Having a bunch of engaged fans and followers is great but not really beneficial if they don’t spend their money with your company. However, there’s lots of evidence to show that inbound marketing can boost conversions. For example, putting a video on your landing page could boost your conversion rate by as much as 86 percent. The great thing about inbound is that it catches shoppers all along the sales funnel, from awareness to consideration, to decision—and, the entire way, your content will help nudge consumers toward your product.

Inbound Marketing Is A Pillar of Modern Business

Inbound marketing is no longer an option for modern businesses. Consumers demand content, whether they’re looking to be entertained or informed. If your company is in a competitive industry, you need inbound more than any other type of marketing. Implementing a solid inbound strategy can help you achieve all your business goals, from growing revenue to boosting brand awareness, to increasing your follower count on social media.