Marketing strategy is all about nurturing relationships with consumers to keep them satisfied and loyal to your brand. We define Integrated Marketing and it’s value here. By using Integrated Marketing strategies, your company can greatly enhance all marketing efforts. In the end, Integrating Inbound Marketing, Experiential Marketing, and Outbound Marketing strategies can make it easier to track ROI, increase your consumer base, and bring more revenue to your bottom line.
Inbound Marketing Strategy
Inbound Marketing is all about building and nurturing relationships with customers. First, to establish yourself as an industry expert, find a pain-point, or a problem that needs to be solved, for which you can provide a solution. For example, you could write relevant content to address industry concerns or providing webinars to help solve industry problems. The goal is to provide a solution that helps solve an industry problem. As a result, your brand earns trust and credibility. Over time, those who come to trust your brand are more likely to seek out your services and tell their friends (word-of-mouth marketing).
Creating content that addresses pain-points of your target audience helps you build rapport, trust, and credibility for your business. In essence, by situating yourself as a hub of industry knowledge, you attract new business prospects. Through various means such as emails, blogs, and chat, you then nurture those prospects by continuing to provide valued content and solutions through nurturing campaigns that feed your sales funnels. Inbound Marketing is often conducted through multi-stream content and other nurturing interactions that are both helpful and relevant to customers.
Examples:
- Blogs
- White Papers
- Social media campaigns (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest)
- E-books
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Videos
- Webinars
Experiential Marketing Strategy
Experiential Marketing capitalizes on the relationships gained from your Inbound Marketing efforts. Overall, the goal is to create an emotional consumer interaction with your brand, product, or service.
How? Overall, the goal of experiential marketing is to form a memorable and emotional connection between the consumer and your brand to generate customer loyalty and influence purchase decisions. By creating memorable experiences that provoke sensory responses. At the base level, if your product or service is a positive experience for a customer, the customer’s response will be a positive emotional response. Therefore, as your company continues to provide positive experiences, consumers remain happy. If a consumer is regularly having positive connections with your brand, they are more likely to become loyal “brand ambassadors”. Brand ambassadors are consumers who advocate your brand and provide referrals. And, word-of-mouth brand awareness can significantly benefit your bottom line.
Check out these staggering stats from the 2018 Local Consumer Review Survey:
- 86% of consumers read reviews for local businesses (including 95% of people aged 18-34)
- Consumers read an average of 10 online reviews before feeling able to trust a local business
- 40% of consumers only take into account reviews written within the past 2 weeks – up from 18% last year
- 57% of consumers will only use a business if it has 4 or more stars
- 80% of 18-34-year-olds have written online reviews – compared to just 41% of consumers over 55
- 91% of 18-34-year-old consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations
- 89% of consumers read businesses’ responses to reviews
By continuing to provide positive customer experiences, you reinforce your brand and establish brand ambassadors. And, that’s a big deal!
Outbound Marketing Strategy
Outbound Marketing is the opposite of Inbound Marketing. This strategy uses traditional marketing methods such as TV/radio advertisements, email marketing, trade shows, print advertising, press release, and direct mail. Unfortunately, the brand message is less targeted and more widespread than with inbound marketing. Therefore, it is difficult to measure ROI (Return on Investment) which may mean spending too much on marketing strategies that just aren’t benefiting your company.
Other Examples:
- TV commercials
- radio ads
- print advertisements (newspaper ads, magazine ads, flyers, brochures, catalogs, etc.)
- tradeshows
- cold calls
- email spam
Over previous decades, marketing budgets were primarily dedicated to traditional, outbound marketing. While outbound marketing still has its place and there is something to be said for direct mail flyers and good old fashioned advertising, outbound efforts are difficult to track. Since outbound marketing is difficult to track but still offers benefits, integrating it with other strategies is a great way to leverage your marketing strategy. Thus, when used in tandem with inbound and experiential marketing, you ensure that no consumer demographics are missed and that you have the same, consistent message throughout all marketing efforts. In the end, the integrating of marketing strategies promises a clear brand message that will establish the credibility of your brand.
Contact us today to see how we can help you leverage your marketing strategy.
