Digital Marketing Needs Inbound Marketing To Drive Real Results

As business owners and CEOs, most of us have heard of the term digital marketing. This includes marketing tactics like websites, email marketing, banner advertising, mobile apps and more—anything that delivers your company’s messages via digital devices. I bet most of us also believe strongly that digital marketing should be part of how we market our companies in 2013.

So the question isn’t do we need it or should we use it, but how do we integrate digital marketing into our overall marketing strategy? Unfortunately, the answer isn’t as simple as you might hope. If you take digital marketing and apply the same outbound approach you apply to non-digital marketing—you’re going to be disappointed in the results.

Before we get into it, let’s talk about results. There is only ONE goal for your marketing and that is to generate leads for your business. If you remember nothing else from this post, remember this. Marketing isn’t about getting your name out there, building a brand or even influencing the sale. Marketing’s sole purpose is to generate leads.

The key to using digital marketing to get leads for your business is inbound marketing; digital marketing needs inbound marketing. This is an approach to marketing that earns people’s attention instead of buying like you would do with traditional outbound marketing like print advertising or cold calling.

When you overlay inbound marketing to digital marketing tactics, you get a whole new perspective on how to use these tactics to generate leads.

Here is an illustration.

Most of us have a website design, but there is a big difference between a website that’s a digital marketing asset and an inbound marketing website. Your prospects are visiting your website right now, looking for an experience that helps them make a good and safe purchase decision. If your website simply provides information about your business—you might be failing to give them the experience they are looking for.

But if your website provides a variety of educational materials, whitepapers, tip guides, eBooks, videos, slide shows, infographics and podcasts now your visitors feel like you want to help them instead of trying to sell them. This is a remarkably different experience that digital marketing assets like the ones mentioned above deliver to your prospects.

The results of this experiential upgrade are leads. Now people who were anonymous website visitors become leads for your business, leads that can be nurtured with additional digital assets until they are ready to buy from your business. This is inbound marketing.

Buyer behavior is dramatically different these days than it was 2 or 3 years ago. Today, your prospects don’t need to talk with one of your sales people to get the information they need on your business, your products, and those of your competitors. Today, they spend their time searching, reading, visiting social media sites and researching your company online—way before they reach out and connect with one of your sales people.

You can leverage digital marketing and inbound marketing to deliver a remarkable experience, or you can continue to do traditional advertising—digital or non-digital.  The results, or lack of, will be the same.

To learn more about inbound marketing and how you can generate more leads for your business, click here to download the Ultimate Inbound Marketing Guide or click on the image below to download the guide.

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