Daniel Vaczi
If you have an old school boss who is set in his antiquated ways, explaining the merits of inbound marketing is quite the challenge. Older executives tend to favor traditional outbound methods of advertising on TV, radio, billboards, cold calling, etc. Though your boss might be resistant to just about any type of change inbound marketing speaks for itself. Here's how to guide your boss into the light.
Step 1: Define Inbound Marketing
If your boss is truly out of touch and living/working in his own little bubble of sorts, he probably won't even know that inbound marketing exists. Though it is hard to believe, some baby boomers do not use the world wide web or other contemporary technologies. This means that you must invest the time, effort and patience required to explain inbound marketing to your superior in layman's terms.
Tell your boss about the emergence of social media including Facebook and Twitter. Explain what an e-mail list is. Then segue into the importance of search engine optimization (SEO). These are all avenues that customers proactively explore.
Forging meaningful connections with prospective customers through these channels has the potential to greatly expand your business. By explaining these inbound marketing avenues to your boss, you will plant the seed for change. Sure, he might initially scoff at the notion of inbound marketing after you attempt to convert your boss. However, he will certainly consider the merits of inbound marketing across these newly-developed channels after that initial conversation, even if it is in a non-verbal manner amidst his thought processes.
Step 2: Explain how Consumer Behaviors Have Changed
The days of strictly relying on ads in magazines and on TV, radio and other traditional mediums are fading away. Modern day marketing requires a multi-tiered approach that takes advantage of breakthroughs in technology. Explain to your boss that a sizable chunk of your target customer base, especially the younger cohort, prefers to use the world wide web on web-enabled personal computing devices. The masses are quickly migrating away from TV and radio toward the Internet.
Step 3: Explain why Inbound Marketing has Reached a Mainstream Tipping Point
The beauty of inbound marketing is that it draws customers to your business without a Herculean effort on your behalf. These marketing strategies take considerably less time to implement than traditional methods. Perhaps most importantly, they require significantly less money to successfully execute than conventional advertising methods.
Tell your boss all about how your industry competitors are allowing customers to come to them through inbound marketing efforts. Investing a small amount of time and money in SEO, an e-mail list, a company blog and/or social media efforts really can make a monumental difference in sales as well as customer loyalty across posterity. There is no sense in paying egregious sums of money for an advertisement on TV, the radio or in a newspaper or magazine if it does not reach the target audience.
The best aspect of inbound marketing is that only those who are genuinely interested in your business's product or service will find you through your inbound marketing channels. They will conduct a web search for your products/services and stumble upon your company's homepage, blog or social media through a search engine query. Others will sign up for your company's e-mail list and be more than willing to read the contents of the weekly/monthly e-mails in-depth. These individuals actually need and/or desire what your company sells. This reality of inbound marketing starkly contrasts to the comparatively broad and intrusive nature of outbound marketing.
Explain to your boss that the number of people watching a TV show or listening to the radio at any given time might be large but only a small percentage of those viewers and listeners actually desire/need what your company offers. Once he begins to understand that inbound marketing attracts already-interested customers, the idea of adopting these new methods will begin to grow in appeal.
Step 4: Explain The Cost-Efficiency Of Inbound Marketing
Creating a TV commercial, a radio jingle or a newspaper/magazine advertisement is a costly effort that often takes a substantial amount of time and money. Not only do you end up spending a ton on them but traditional marketing activities are mostly hard to measure, and consequently, hard to refine as needed.
With inbound marketing, every facet of your campaign can be easily tracked and measured. You can analyze what's working and what's not, and focus your attention and resources on the campaigns that are bringing you the most customers. On top of that, your campaigns function with an organic, word-of-mouth power so a little goes a long way so as long as you'e consistent.
Step 5: Explain how Inbound Marketing Reinforces Existing Outbound Marketing Efforts
It is imperative that you explicitly state that you are not trying to scrap all of the company's outbound marketing efforts. Rather, new inbound marketing initiatives can complement existing outbound marketing efforts. Provide an easy-to-understand example to your boss that illustrates exactly how this dynamic occurs. Pose a hypothetical situation in which an individual searches the world wide web for local suppliers of a particular product or service that your business sells.
Thanks to your organization's recently instituted inbound marketing efforts (SEO), the customer stumbles upon your company's blog, homepage, social media or other online footprint. He then proceeds to follow the business on social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. A couple of days later he sees one of your company's outbound advertisements on a billboard, in the newspaper or on the TV/radio. Since he is already familiar with the brand due to inbound marketing efforts, he immediately recognizes the business. Explain how an individual in such a situation is much more inclined to patronize the business than if he were strictly exposed to only the outbound advertisement.
Simply put, if your business has not adopted inbound marketing just yet and is stuck on the old traditional marketing ways, you are already far behind your competitors no matter what industry you may be in. The case for inbound marketing is this -- measurable success welcomed by the audience that matters. Boom.
