Lynn Sharafeddine started by building websites, but over time, she’s become an expert on how to use them to bring in customers as the content manager for Market8. We recently talked with her about some of the benefits of inbound marketing and how to use it.
Hi, Lynn! So, what’s great about inbound marketing?
There are a billion things you should love about inbound marketing, but here are my personal favorites:
1. It’s marketing that your buyers love. You’re no longer having to go around knocking on their door hoping to get someone interested. All you’re doing is making it easy for leads who you know are already interested to find your website, navigate through it and convert into customers.
2. It’s cost-effective. Sure, if you look at it out of context, you might think that hiring an inbound marketing in-house or partnering up with an inbound marketing agency is expensive. But once you compare that to the price of putting out ads on TV or billboards, you’ll see that you get much higher return on investment and much happier customers.
Where does inbound marketing fit into an overall web marketing strategy?
Ideally, inbound marketing should work hand in hand with your website. Your website should be optimized for all the inbound marketing efforts you’re putting in place, and it should complement them.
If you created a piece of content that you’re pushing out in social media, you’ll need a kickbutt landing page for people to convert on. If you have an amazing sales process, translate that into having a great site architecture and user flow.
What are some common misconceptions about inbound marketing?
I think mostly it’s when it comes to misusing the tools, which are becoming smarter to combat that. Not so long ago, we had people keyword-stuffing to rank higher or buying email lists and things like that. This beats the purpose of centering marketing efforts around your buyers. Now it’s just spam.
But like I said, the tools nowadays are smarter, and thankfully these things are dwindling down.
What’s the intersection between SEO and inbound marketing?
SEO is, I think, a subset of inbound marketing. The first thing you need to do is to be able to get found by your buyers. That’s either by a strong social media presence, but more importantly by high SERP rankings for relevant and long-tail keywords that your buyers are using. This is where SEO comes into play.
What do you wish every business knew about inbound marketing?
Every business needs to know inbound marketing. Here’s how we see it: You have a company that is working. This means that people are actually interested in the product or service that you’re offering. So you know you have a whole audience out there who’s probably using the internet to try and find a solution like yours. If you’re not out there to get their attention, someone else will.
How do you see inbound marketing changing in the future?
The trend is going more and more towards personalization and customization. Buyers are getting smarter and less patient. They only want to see the answers that are relevant for them. Already, marketing platforms like HubSpot have the capability of changing whole web pages based on who’s viewing them. In the future, that’s going to be the case all the time. Personalized and customized marketing.
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