Building a business takes a great deal of effort. One of the essential elements of building a business is marketing its products and services.

There are many ways to market a business. However, one of the most powerful ways is to use inbound marketing tactics.

This article will highlight the features of this powerful marketing medium.

How is inbound marketing different?

Many times people think of marketing as sending salespeople out on the street or placing an ad in some form of medium. This is commonly referred to as outbound marketing. It relies on numbers to snag people who may be interested in your business. Going door to door can take hundreds of calls to find someone who is interested. And, placing an ad may have to reach thousands of people just to find a dozen prospects.

Inbound marketing is different because it relies on attraction to bring people in. It is primarily associated with leveraging the Internet to bring targeted customers to a website. The ratio of interested people to visitors is very near one to one as opposed to other forms of advertising.

How does inbound marketing work?

Inbound relies on attraction as its funnel to gain customers. The idea is that a business does not want just anyone visiting its website. It wants people who are interested in what they offer. This makes it a very targeted form of advertising.

There are several tools used to enhance the attraction phase. These include blogging, search engine optimization, website pages and social publishing.

• Blogging allows a business to provide a lot of educational content to potential customers that can answer questions and overcome objections ahead of time.
• Search engine optimization allows a business to rank on terms that customers are for at a specific time. In order to accomplish this, keywords are carefully chosen and analyzed for search volume and competition. Then content is written in an effort rank on these terms.
• Social publishing is the tool used to share useful content on a myriad of different platforms. The goal is to create a viral campaign that is shared among contacts in an effort to extend the reach of advertising and increase brand.

Once prospects are attracted to a website, the next step is to convert them into leads. This is done by gathering their information. You will need to offer something in return for this information, and this is typically done with ebooks, white papers or discounts.

Some of the tools used to gather information and convert visitors into leads include forms, calls-to-action and landing pages.

• Forms are used to collect information about the prospect. The basic information you will need is an email address. But, gathering names and phone numbers can be useful in some cases.
• Calls to action are links that encourage your visitors to take some form of action. This could be encouraging them to download the ebook or whitepaper in exchange for their information.
• Landing pages are the destination a visitor is sent when they take the call-to-action. This is where they receive the information they requested in exchange for the information they provided.

The last step in an inbound marketing funnel is to close the customers. Once they are in your funnel, you can keep in constant communication with them using various tools like customer relationship management software and email respondents.

Inbound marketing is a targeted and powerful form of advertising. It puts the business in control of the process, and allows them to focus on their service, product and customer service. Bringing in new customers can all be handled in an automated fashion.