Look before you leap.

This article will give you a clear vision on inbound marketing before you make the leap to invest such strategy into your business.

Marketing used to require a big budget to target a large audience. Unable to make substantial investments in marketing, many companies found themselves losing an uphill battle to brokerage firms' campaigns, while others simply gave up and avoided marketing altogether, relying almost exclusively on referrals to grow their businesses.

What Has Changed?

Connecting with audience through multi-million dollar ad campaigns such as printed advertisements, mails, radio announcements, TV commercials, cold calls, otherwise collectively known as outbound marketing, is not as effective as it once was.

Your audience now has new ways to block outbound marketing messages of all kinds. They skip television commercials with DVRs, hide internet ads with pop-up blockers and web content filters, screen incoming phone calls with caller ID, and put cold calls onto block lists.

How to Reboot Your Business Now?

       Age of Inbound Marketing:

• Inbound marketing dominated organizations experience a 61% lower cost per lead than outbound marketing dominated organizations.

• 62% of companies said that social media had become more important as a source of leads.

• Respondents who spend more than 50% of their budget on inbound marketing channels report a significantly lower cost per sales lead than those who spend the same budgets on outbound marketing channels.

• Inbound marketing is about creating and sharing content. The purpose for this is to make your prospects (Buyer Persona) grant you permission to engage them, usually by opting in to receive your newsletter or by leaving comments or feedback on your website or blog.

• It focuses on getting found by prospects through blogs, podcasts, eBooks, eNewsletters, website pages, whitepapers, search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, and other forms of content marketing. By creating content specifically designed to appeal to your ideal clients, inbound marketing attracts qualified prospects to your firm and keeps them coming back for more.

Now that we've laid the ground-work, let's continue on with the 5 things you can do to improve your own company's Inbound Marketing Strategy!