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January 12, 2016 at 05:30 AM
Financial advisors: You may be getting inbound marketing wrong. That is, if you know about inbound marketing.
New business acquisition remains the number one priority for RIAs, according to the Schwab 2015 RIA Benchmarking Study. For RIAs looking to create an additional income stream, inbound marketing is less intrusive to prospects than traditional outbound strategies. But what is it? Here are seven things inbound marketing is not:
1. Inbound Marketing Is Not Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing may have gone the way of the Pontiac, Plymouth and Oldsmobile (although the Pontiac Bonneville, Plymouth Barracuda and Oldsmobile Toronado were swell cars in their day).
Old-time outbound marketing included — and still includes — such marketer-centric and interruption-based methods as cold calling, unwanted emails, banner ads, wholesaler walk-throughs, and print, radio, and television advertising. All things that generally interrupt. Think: megaphone.
Inbound marketing, by contrast, is permission-based: it seeks to educate and inform prospective investors and clients when they are ready to hear from you. It’s about making your website a leading salesperson. Prospects find you from their initial web search — if you have a relevant blog post, ebook, white papers, video, or other content with consonant keywords and SEO infrastructure. Think: magnet.
Inbound marketing is based on knowing your customers (their “personas”) and creating and leveraging content simply for them. Your content should act like a magnet, to capture your prospect’s attention — so they come bounding in to your for more helpful information.
2. Inbound Marketing Is Not a Campaign
While a campaign or promotion may focus on a single service or product for a specific period of time, inbound marketing is an overall marketing strategy, and a long-term strategy at that. Inbound marketing seeks to educate and provide value to prospective clients by delivering useful content at the right place at the right time to the right people. A campaign seeks to sell a product or service. Inbound marketing looks to build long-term brand reputation. A campaign is a small part of inbound marketing.
3. Inbound Marketing Is Not Content Marketing
According to the Content Marketing Institute, “Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.” While some use the terms interchangeably, inbound marketing and content marketing are not one in the same. Inbound marketing is the philosophy and strategy; content marketing is the tactical approach to going inbound.
