What Is Inbound Marketing (and How Does "Hey, Geekly!" Fit In)?

If you're in business or business marketing, there are a few questions you have likely repeatedly asked. Indeed, odds are good that you have wondered this exact question: "What is inbound marketing?" 

You may have also asked other related questions, like "How can I find an expert and affordable agency to help me enhance my inbound marketing?" or "What do I need to do to improve my social media or websites to grow my customer base?"

We're glad you asked. Geekly Media is a team of inbound marketing experts! Today we shared some Inbound Marketing 101 tips and talk about how our "Hey, Geekly!" Methodology fits in.

What Is Inbound Marketing (vs. Outbound Marketing)?

Inbound marketing targets potential customers by creating useful, relevant, and interesting content. It's a strategy to engage prospects and lead to them to your website instead of pushing out obvious advertisements that disrupt or aren't relevant to a prospect. 

This strategy involves your business creating content that will attract customers, engage them, inform them, and then ultimately provide them with something of value. This process increases the relevance of your business in a customer's mind and helps them see you as an authority. It also makes them more likely to do business with you.

By contrast, outbound marketing is a strategy in which the company starts the conversation. Think of a commercial or paid ad on YouTube. The key difference between these two strategies is inbound marketing pulls customers in, while outbound marketing pushes a message out to customers.

What Are the Benefits of Inbound Marketing

Does inbound marketing work? It does! The major benefits make it a highly attractive form of finding new customers. 

The top benefits include:

• It can be much cheaper than outbound marketing. With the right expertise on staff or by working with an experienced inbound marketing agency, you can create engaging content for low or no cost.

• It can be highly targeted toward people who are genuinely interested in your content. This means you're reaching people already thinking about how a company like yours can fill a need they have. 

• It allows you to create high-quality content with a high success rate in turning a lead into a sale. Conversion rates are often higher with inbound marketing strategies than with outbound efforts. 

Inbound marketing brings leads to you with a better likelihood of converting them into buyers!

How to Create Successful Inbound Marketing Campaigns

Inbound marketing campaigns are geared around topics, areas of interest, or products and services that your business delivers. Steps involved in creating a successful inbound marketing campaign include:

• Gaining a solid understanding of your customers, where they spend their time, and what they are searching for when they look for your product.

• Setting your goals for marketing, including the metrics you want to use and the increases you are seeking. 

• Determining the content that can help you meet these goals and what platform you can use that create that content.

• Understanding how to get individuals who download that content to turn from a lead to a sale.

Often, marketers turn to inbound experts to walk through these steps and develop goals. 

What are the Best Tactics for Attracting Website Visitors?

Your website is a critical component of any inbound marketing campaign. This is where SEO efforts will deliver organic traffic, so your site needs to be ready for conversions! 

This means you must:

• Optimize your keywords for SEO purposes.

• Apply all metadata, including headers, descriptions, and alt images.

• Regularly refresh the content on your website, including creating evergreen content.

• Build community engagement on social media that points people back to your website. 

The best SEO strategies will fail if your business website isn't built to convert visitors into leads. 

How Can Small Businesses Turn Website Visitors Into Customers?

At Geekly Media, we get inbound marketing. As a leading inbound marketing agency, we can take you through our proven process and help you pull in more leads and sales. We call our strategy, "Hey, Geekly!" Here's how it works.

Discover the Questions Your Customers Are Asking

Keyword research, analytics, and SEO data can help you determine exactly how your customers are arriving on your webpage and what questions they are trying to get answered. In addition, your sales team can probably give you a list of the most common questions they get when talking with prospects and customers. 

Answer Those Questions

Once you have identified the right questions, you need to answer them in a way that search engines will be able to find. This allows you to provide customers with the expertise and value you offer through well-researched, helpful content.  

Place Those Answers in Many Places

Depending on the nature of your business and the available resources, generate answers to the questions, then put them in as many places as you can. These answers can live on online platforms, including:

• Your social media platforms and blog

• Your website, which can also host your blog and link to your social media

• FAQs or knowledge base articles, particularly if you deal with a topic that demands a level of expertise

Through our "Hey, Geekly!" process, we help businesses work through these steps, from discovering the most-asked questions you need to answer to generate traffic to creating content and distributing it where quality leads are more likely to find it.

How Can Your Measure the Success of Your Inbound Marketing Campaign?

A campaign is only successful if you measure that success. To do so, you should:

• Align your metrics with your goals. For example, if you want to increase your leads, the amount of people who download your targeted content is an excellent start.

• Use appropriate Google Analytics or related data.

• Work with an inbound marketing agency to help you determine the appropriate metrics to measure. 

HubSpot makes it easy to set up and track campaigns across multiple channels. 

Use an Experienced Inbound Marketing Agency to Get Started

As a HubSpot Diamond Partner Agency, Geekly Media is one of just 3% of other partner agencies included in this tier. We work hard to develop winning inbound marketing strategies and work within the HubSpot platform to help businesses experience more traffic, leads, and revenue. 

There are many reasons why you should use an inbound marketing agency at this level to start or improve your inbound marketing success. Diamond partners can create and execute the strategies you need to grow your business. We have the resources and expertise necessary to help your inbound marketing campaign be successful. 

We offer the "Hey, Geekly!" program to kickstart optimal inbound marketing strategies for businesses like yours! Reach out soon to learn more about how we can help. 

Ready to learn more about inbound marketing? Download our free "Inbound Marketing Kit!"