Does your marketing strategy include bombarding random people with direct mailers, placing flyers under windshield wipers and making cold calls of numbers you pick from the phone book?
My guess is you haven’t found this to be very effective since people have grown a tolerance to marketing harassment. Those mailers and flyers are dumped in the trash and their phone numbers are added to the do-not-call registry. It’s time to bring your marketing strategy into the digital age!
The new rockstar of the marketing world is INBOUND MARKETING. Inbound marketing targets the customer who is already searching for your product or service. Put more time into ranking your website on organic search results. Then you make your business easy to find for users who are more likely to become customers. They need you! Now you just have to make it easy for them to find you and convert them to customers.
The best ways to be digitally ‘found’ is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content marketing. If you invest more time into ranking your website on organic search results instead of handing out flyers on a street corner, you will show a much greater return on your investment by converting more customers.
ACCORDING TO SEARCH ENGINE JOURNAL, ORGANIC SEARCH LEADS HAVE A 14.6% CLOSE RATE, AS OPPOSED TO 1.7% FOR OUTBOUND MARKETING LEADS.
As you can see, the rate at which organic search leads close sales is significantly higher than that of outbound marketing leads. Why is that? It’s easier to convince someone who is already looking for your product or service to buy it. As opposed to advertising your service to a random person via a commercial or flyer. Make your job easier and target people who are already interested in your type of product or services.
Let’s look at the differences between Inbound and Outbound Marketing for clarification: