When I’m attending networking events or just meeting with local business owners I’m asked regularly about Inbound Marketing. Based on the number of times I’ve heard (and answered) the question now, I suspect that you’ve heard the term ‘inbound marketing‘ too and may be wondering, what’s that? And how does it work anyway?

Recently I found an amazing infographic from the folks at Hubspot and thought I’d post it here to my blog to help you better understand this strange new language called inbound marketing.

The process of inbound marketing involves 6 distinct steps or stages

Step One: Your marketing strategy needs to be clear and well understood by your customers and team.

Step Two: Have a powerful, high value website filled with information for your customers to search as they seek solutions to the problems that they want to solve.

Step Three: Generate more and targeted traffic to your website. You do this by blogging to create more content, with search engine optimization (SEO) and through social media (and occasionally by using paid advertising).

Step Four: You convert visitors to your site into leads that you can sell. This is the art behind the science of inbound marketing and stems directly from the marketing strategy that was created in step one. Its often done by creating valuable ‘offers’ such as free ebooks, white papers, or software that visitors can access by providing you with their email address and a bit of other information in exchange for access to your offer.

Step Five: Convert leads into ‘sales ready’ leads. Here, lead nurturing is a powerfully effective way to take a visitor who is largely unfamiliar with your company and providing them with enough info that they’re ready to buy – from your company.

Step Six: Measure and improve. Its been long said that what can’t be measured, can’t be improved and I think this is true. When you know what’s working (and why) then you can do more of it and improve your results. When you know what’s not working, you can eliminate the wasted effort from your process. Over time things become more efficient and your ROI on marketing grows.

Source: Hubspot

Post your questions and comments below and let me know if you need help with anything related to creating an inbound marketing campaign in your business. We offer all of our readers a no-cost, no obligation strategy session, so if you want help go here and let’s get something scheduled.

In a recent conversation with a prospective client, he stopped me in mid-sentence to ask the question “What is Inbound Marketing, anyway?” He went on to tell me that I’d used the term a few times in our conversation and he simply had no idea what I was talking about.

Ahh, the things we learn when we listen to customers…

Having spent nearly 2 years up to my neck in marketing for clients, closely following the Inbound Marketing methodology, I’d lost sight of the fact that many business owners did not know what inbound marketing was.

So in the event you have been wondering about it as well, I thought I’d try to explain in a post.

Outbound Marketing vs Inbound Marketing

First, start with an older form of marketing that is referred to as ‘outbound marketing’ and then turn it upside down and you’d have inbound marketing. Outbound marketing is interruption driven and usually involves things like cold call prospecting, either in person or by telephone. Radio, television and print advertising are other forms of outbound marketing.

That old model is rooted in the old marketing adage of A-I-D-A. (yes another strange term to explain)

AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Decision, Action.

This means that if I don’t…