In today's episode I'm going to be sharing a marketing strategy that is
designed to do one thing and one thing only and that's to have customers show
up at your door ready to buy with cash or credit cards in hand. It sounds too
good to be true, but for those who know how to do it, it's very real and I'm
going to share the strategy with you today. Hey there my name is Adam Earhart,
modern marketing strategist and welcome to The Modern Marketing show, where we
help you grow your business by making better marketing. So if you're interested
in learning the latest and greatest marketing strategies, tools, tips, tricks
and tactics, well you may want to consider subscribing and hitting that
notification bell. When I first got into marketing, I wasn't that good at sales. I
liked talking to people and helping them, I just hated the selling part. I think my
closing line might have been something like: "so, what would you like to do".
Hardly a compelling close and yet I would still more often than not make the
sale. So why? Well, what I had yet to realize at the time was that my
marketing and everything that had happened up until that point had all but
closed the deal for me. So, when I finally did speak to a
prospect or a potential client, well, they were already sold on working with me and
really all I need to do is get out of my own way and that's where inbound
marketing comes into play. Inbound marketing is the strategy of using
content marketing, social media, search engine optimization and building a solid
brand so clients naturally come to you rather than you having to go out there
and get them. Basically, you create content customers find it or more
accurately you position it so it's easy for them to find then they consume it,
they love it, they love you and then they come back to you for more and from the
very first days of starting my very first agency I absolutely knew and loved
the power that inbound marketing could have, especially for someone that wasn't
that good at sales. After all, who wouldn't want a magical funnel that just
magically made customers appear at your business, magically. The other thing that
inbound marketing did for me was that it made the whole sales process completely
seamless and I absolutely loved to this part. After all, by using an inbound
marketing strategy, it enables you to overcome any objections or answer any
questions that may come up during a sales call, well, you can do this way
ahead of time just by creating content that solves it. Worried that someone's
gonna ask about prices? Cuz you know that topics gonna come up. Well, you can handle
this by talking about price ahead of time or even posting prices right on
your website. Afraid of getting me I'm too busy or I'll think about it or I'll
call you back later objection, well, you can
this ahead of time by stressing the importance or framing it with some kind
of scarcity or urgency. Don't want to make it all the way through a sales
pitch only to get blindsided at the end with the I don't think this is right for
me objection? Well, then make sure it's right for them ahead of time by giving
them content through a video or a podcast or even a blog article that
explains exactly who this is for and who it's not for and identify why it's
important and how it's gonna help them. There's a side benefit to this as well,
is that when you clearly stake your flag in the ground and say exactly who you're
for and who you're not for, well, you build that much more trust with the
people that you're trying to attract and the people that you don't really want
anyway, well, you didn't want them anyway. Win-win. Using an inbound marketing
strategy you can also paint a really clear compelling picture of how life is
right now for your potential prospect or customer and how it could be later after
doing business with you. A natural byproduct of all of this is that it
positions you as the expert and the authority and essentially the go-to
resource when they're ready to take action. Oh yeah, and you can do this all
without ever talking to anyone in person. This makes inbound marketing the perfect
strategy for introverts people who hate sales and busy people who really just
don't want to be stuck on the phone all day. Don't get me wrong, I love talking to
people, but having an inbound marketing strategy deployed in my business, well, it
allows me to have thousands of mini salespeople working 24/7 365 days a year
out there spreading the good word and helping to attract more people to me.
It's why we use it with all our clients and it's why you should use it too.
The way I teach how inbound marketing really works is through a concept I call
"Intercepting Attention". You see, unlike outbound marketing where your goal is to
go out there and try to get your message directly in front of someone who may or
may not be in the mood right now and then try to convince them to A) Pay
attention and B) Care. Well, with an intercepting attention strategy all
you're really doing is redirecting and intercepting attention that they're
already putting out there and redirecting it towards you and your
business and that's the beauty here, with an inbound marketing strategy and by
intercepting their attention you don't have to go out there and create demand,
you're simply taking advantage of demand that's already there and then guiding it
towards you and your business as the solution. You don't need to make them
care because they already care, that's why they're looking, that's where their
attentions going. All you need to do is present information or content or some
kind of marketing materials in front of them and then guide them to you.
Alright, so now that I've made inbound marketing sound like the
greatest strategy ever, it's time to take a good hard look at where it may not be
the best case or even a viable solution at all and where you'd be much better
served by using an outbound marketing strategy. The number one reason to
prioritize an outbound marketing strategy over an inbound marketing
strategy is if you've got a product or a service or a business that nobody's
searching for. Basically, if you've got a brand new product or a brand new service
or a brand new kind of business idea that nobody's really familiar with, well,
it's gonna be really hard to redirect attention that's not there in the first
place. Same thing as if your business is really hard to describe and again, you
can't really figure out what keywords or how you're gonna be able to intercept
that attention in the first place. Same thing goes if it's really complicated or
does a ton of different things and you're really not sure the best way to
kind of position it, well, this is where an outbound strategy is gonna play a
little bit of a preference over an inbound. The next reason to prioritize
outbound over inbound is if you don't have a lot of patience and you're not
willing to wait around for people to find you or your content. Inbound
marketing tends to take a bit of time and it can vary upon a ton of different
factors like just how much search volume is there. Do you have a seasonal business
where it's gonna fluctuate depending on what time of year it is? or are people
even looking for you at all? Like we covered in point number one. If you need
sales and you want growth now, you're gonna want to look at outbound. Because
with outbound you could control the volume and the flow of the marketing
that you're putting out there but with inbound you can't exactly make people
search more for the content that you're providing. The third reason to prioritize
outbound over inbound is if you've got a unique or differentiated offer that you
know people are gonna respond to. Again, if you want growth and you want sales
and you know that you've got an offer that people are going to respond to and
gonna want to act on right away, that simply doesn't make sense to wait around
for an inbound marketing strategy to make traction or to essentially start
bringing in all the traffic you know you're capable of processing. For this
reason, an outbound strategy is going to work fantastic because ads or
advertising online or even offline, well, its scalable and allows you to just pump
more and more volume out there getting in front of even more people and the
fourth reason to prioritize outbound over inbound is if you want a certain
level of control and you really want to be able to test things and find out
which ones gonna work best and you want to get this data quickly. After all, as we
already covered inbound marketing takes time and if you want to test out which
headlines or which content or which strategy
is really going to deliver the best results well it's not gonna make a lot
of sense to wait around three six or maybe even twelve months for the results
to come back. As an example, making changes to your inbound marketing
strategy and leveraging a search engine optimization strategy, well, making
changes to your website could take three months, six months, maybe even longer for
those changes and results to start showing up in the search engines. With
outbound marketing on the other hand, using an advertising tool like Facebook
Ads or Instagram ads or YouTube ads, well, you can have an ad out there in as
little as a few hours and start clicking data right away about which headline or
which offer which message is going to resonate best with your market. Alright,
let's take a real quick look at how an inbound marketing strategy vs. an
outbound marketing strategy might work in different contexts of
business-to-business or B2B businesses and business to consumer or B2C
businesses. First up is the B2B or business-to-business business basically
here your customer is another business and when it comes to an outbound and
inbound marketing strategy, well, probably not surprisingly, you're gonna want to
deploy a little bit of both. When it comes to an inbound marketing strategy
it's going to be really important to keep your keywords focused around terms
that that business is going to be looking for in order to solve the
problem that they're currently experiencing. Also you probably want to
sway a little more in the direction of more traditional marketing assets like
white papers or case studies or real-world results that your business
was able to achieve. Also don't forget about good old
outbound prospecting and really going out there and making connections and
nurturing leads and doing all the things that we've had to do with B2B businesses
for years. After all, you're gonna be drawing from a much smaller customer
pool essentially the number of target audience that you're going to be trying
to go after or the number of potential businesses you're going to try to bring
on as clients it's going to be a lot more limited allowing you to be more
customized and really tailor solutions directly for them. Now, when it comes to a
B2C or business-to-consumer business, where the end customer is actually a
normal consumer and not a business, well, many of these strategies are still going
to apply. For starters, leveraging an inbound marketing strategy is still
going to be phenomenally powerful but you're gonna want to tailor it and
customize it just a little bit more than you would with the B2B. You see, with B2B
you probably want to keep most of your content more product and business
specific that's really going to be addressing direct concerns that your
potential prospect might have. With a B2C type, inbound
marketing strategy, however, you're gonna want to take things a little broader and
start to create content around other areas that your customers may be
interested in not just strictly related to your product. Also, when it comes to
the outbound aspect of your marketing, well, obviously we're not going to use a
custom and tailored approach or any prospecting that involves going out
there and finding individual people to contact. Rather, you're gonna want to
leverage online advertising solutions like Facebook Ads Instagram ads and
YouTube ads, which allows you to get your message directly targeted at exactly who
you're trying to get, your ideal target market, and send it out to tens of
thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, tens millions, even hundreds of millions
of people. So you better make sure that your message is on point. Basically, when
it comes to B2B or B2C, both inbound marketing and outbound marketing are
going to be valuable strategies, however, there's going to be significant
differences in what these strategies look like. Alright, so now that I've
covered all that which one is best? Inbound Marketing or Outbound Marketing?
Well, probably not surprisingly the solution here to true marketing success
is a combination of inbound Plus outbound. Use outbound marketing for
short term wins and cash flow and use inbound marketing for long-term growth
and brand building. That's what we do inside the agency and it's a strategy we
recommend for all our clients, because it works. The next thing you're going to
want to do is check out the video I have linked up right here it's part of our
B2B vs. B2C series. So make sure to check back then. Thanks for watching and
I'll catch you next time on The Modern Marketing Show. And how can you reach
them in a way that builds trust and goodwill and positions you as the
authority and go-to expert in your industry? Well, the answer to that my
friend and the strategy that I believe is probably the single most effective
one available today...