There was a time when clients were attracted to telemarketing and media ads, or outbound marketing. Like banging heads against a wall, merchants paid big money to disseminate product and service information, shouting from the rooftops, with hopes that customers and investors soon would respond. The “if you build it, they will come” attitude. To marketers who are still banging away, this is a wake-up call.
We are increasingly inundated with messaging, causing information overload and the “tune out effect.” That’s why, moving forward into 2013, inbound marketing is the hot strategy for garnering attention. Likely a familiar practice for PR pros, this means spending less money on pay-per-clicks and more time creating engaging online content and conversations. The idea is to draw customers to your virtual doorstep without directly spending money or being pushy with your message.
Choose the right platform.
In his book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR, David Meerman Scott suggests that marketers should earn their way into the hearts of consumers versus begging or bugging. With that in mind, you might ask: How does one introduce products and services to target audiences?
Scott focuses on the importance of real-time information sharing. It’s easy to understand, considering how technology sparks our need for instant engagement. To start, identify where your target audience is communicating about your topic of interest. Is it a blog, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Google+ or some other online community? Next, insert yourself into the conversation. Identify who the conversation influencers are and engage them! Remember: folks are most likely to trust peer recommendations.
Create clever content and measure success.
To engage, say something that interests, entertains or educates your audience in a way that elicits response. The goal is to create a two-way conversation or, better yet, multi-way conversation that leads back to your product or services. What you say will largely depend on the platform you’ve chosen – a white paper will look wildly different from a blog post. Some social networking may call for tweet-length messages and article links, while videos, podcasts or infographics may be more appropriate for YouTube or Facebook. Posing questions in a public forum and asking others to share your content can enable sentiments to go viral.
As with all professional efforts, measuring effectiveness is an important part of the process. Perhaps this means monitoring your website traffic with Google Analytics, determining the number of times your company is mentioned in conjunction with a topic, or tracking the way online conversations instigate sales. In any case, the benchmark will depend on your overarching goals.
Inbound marketing and health care?
In the world of health care, patients, their families and doctors increasingly turn to online resources for health care information. Spectrum teams deploy inbound marketing techniques to spread the word about treatment options. For example, our client RESOLVE tells the story of embryo donation through inbound marketing, while Alnylam uses inbound marketing to identify and educate the most credible messengers to talk about an emerging medical technology. Hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, device manufacturers and other health care organizations stand to greatly benefit from the creation of an online presence to share research and information about products and services, in the context of the needs of their audiences.
How has inbound marketing benefited your business?