Hubspot Blog Post "Different Types of Marketing: Traditional and Inbound Marketing"

Different Types of Marketing

Traditional Marketing: 
There is the traditional marketing approach, where the ads are interruptive, cold-calling, and cold emails (SPAM). This type of marketing may be seen as annoying and doesn't relate to every customer.

Inbound Marketing: 
Inbound marketing is the extra content on the webpage and the helpful tools that make customers come back to the webpage. Consumers don't always want to be sold to, they also want to be educated about products and services. Inbound marketing is targeted towards ideal customers. The inbound mythology is to attract, convert, close, and delight. As a company, you want to attract the right people who would be most interested in your product, and then convert them to leads and close them as customer. Then once they are customers, the company will want to delight and satisfy them so that they go out and tell people about the great experience they had with the company. This would be positive word of mouth marketing that businesses love, because it is free marketing. Businesses constantly have to be analyzing to see what they are doing right and what they can improve upon.

The Inbound Mythology

Image source: Google images

Four Fundamentals of Inbound Success
We also learned that there are four fundamentals of inbound success:

• The first fundamental is to use buyer personas. This means to use a semi-fictional character that the company will create based on real data to represent their ideal customers. This first fundamental is really trying to find the target market. To create the personas, the company will need to do some research on the role, company/organization, goals, challenges, where they spend the most time, personal background, and their shopping preferences. It takes as much research as you need to create the persona.

• The second fundamental is to use the buyer's journey. This is the active research process that someone goes through leading up to the purchase. There are three stages: The awareness stage- discovering a problem or opportunity, or people. The consideration stage- finding solutions, investing in specific solutions to get more information. Finally the decision stage- choosing the best solution for them.

• The third fundamental is to create remarkable content. Inbound marketing is content and context. The content is the toolkit, the blog post, free content, photos, videos, and anything that can be educational. The context is who we are creating this content for, the content is tailored toward people. 

• The fourth fundamental is to leverage your content. It's not enough to only have great content, you have to find a way to get that content out into the world. Distribution of the content makes it relative to people. There are different ways of distributing the content. It can be distributed through webpages, business blogs, social media, landing pages, calls to action, and marketing emails.