Inbound Marketing: The Gift that Keeps on Giving

Regardless of which holiday you celebrate this holiday season, most if not all holidays have one thing in common. The tradition of giving gifts and presents! The giving of a gift to celebrate the holidays is something that is very special to both the gift giver and the receiver. It’s something that should be remembered throughout the entire year and hopefully for years to come.  

As the father of a 7-year-old and an 11-year-old, I know how important gifts are for any occasion and how much time and MONEY we spend on getting them exactly what they want with the intention that they will cherish our gifts and play with them for hour upon hour for years to come. However, as their rooms which are full of seldomly-used toys indicates, this is often not the case. It’s usually more true than not that, even though we get them exactly the gift that they wanted so bad, it’s often forgotten a few weeks or even days later.  

What if there was a gift that you knew they would play with and it would return countless hours of fun over the years? Wouldn’t that be a better investment than the latest shiny object (like a Hatchimal) that will be soon forgotten after the holidays?

Inbound Marketing Keeps On Generating ROI

Consider your sales and marketing budget and expenditures from this current year for a minute. Did you spend money on short-term projects or campaigns that generated a few leads or sales and were then dead and gone, never to generate another lead for you? This past spring, did you send a team to a trade show to prospect or to set up an over priced vendor booth and sponsor the show? How many leads is that effort bringing you in the December cold or in the coming years? I hate to break it to you, but long-term, that money you spent on your one-time ad or marketing campaign will be worth about as much as a Hatchimal will be in December, 2017. It won’t be generating you any new leads and you won’t be thinking about it much as you have moved on to the next shiny object.  

A Long-term Investment is Better

What if there was a gift that you knew would continue to generate new leads every day, every week, every month for years to come? Wouldn’t that long-term investment be better a one-time marketing spend with limited return and shelf-life? I think so.

This is what inbound marketing and content marketing does for companies across almost every conceivable industry. When companies start to use an inbound approach to lead generation, the main activity they begin to engage in is creating content (like this blog post or the premium content that's linked to at the bottom) for their blogs or websites. This content doesn’t disappear or go away after a few days or weeks. Quite the contrary, it’s indexed by Google, used by salespeople in the sales process and available for years to come.

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Inbound Pays Multiple Times Over

Companies that are using inbound marketing do spend a fair amount time blogging and creating content, but the best thing about doing so is that this content is read and shared, and it generates leads 24 hours a day for as long as the content is available on the Internet (thanks, Al Gore). For instance, this blog that I am writing will not only be seen by you today but by thousands of others over the months to come, and will continue to generate views and leads from the premium content that’s linked at the bottom of the blog.

In addition to inbound marketing being a great gift that keeps on giving, it can do something that many forms of media such as print can’t do. It can change over time and be updated with new call to actions or information. It truly is, the gift that keeps on giving for years to come.

If you agree that it’s better to make investments in your company that keep on giving, you should seriously consider learning more about the inbound approach to lead generation and give yourself, your sales team, and your marketing team the gift that keeps on giving!