In today’s interview I’m chatting with Stephan Burkhardt, from Versio2.com about Inbound Marketing and we addressed the following questions:
- What is ‘Inbound Marketing’ ?
- What are the key elements to an ‘Inbound Marketing’ strategy?
- What’s the ultimate goal: traffic or leads? How do you increase both?
- What makes a good website today?
- Explanation about different Online Personas
Inbound Marketing 101 – an interview with Stephan Burkhardt
Watch the video interview below or download the full transcript HERE.
Excerpt of the transcript:
Sarah: Let’s start right away with my first question: what is Inbound Marketing?
Stephan: Inbound Marketing is a methodology by which you try to attract visitors and possible consumers of your brand to your website, kind of like bees are attracted to honey. And so it changes the traditional paradigm that we’re used to which is a little bit sort of tongue in cheeks, sometimes called pay and pray.
That is traditional advertising where you’re splashing ads in newspapers and on walls and then you hope that somebody will see it that is actually interested in the message that you have to convey. I mean, for example, a car ad. You may not be buyer of a car at all. You may not be for 10 years but you see an ad. So there’s a lot of waste that way.
You create something interesting, you talk about stuff that’s useful to people. You give them value and they come back.
They read your newsletter. They click on your email. They download something. They listen to a broadcast like this one because they hopefully will get some benefit out of it. So you get people inbound to your brand and get engagement and so forth. You talk about details maybe a little bit later on. That’s basically what it is.
Sarah: Excellent. So what we used to do before was outbound?
Stephan: Yeah. I guess you can say that. It was outbound. It was really broadcasting like a TV ad, or a radio ad, or a magazine ad, that kind of advertising. Now there are some mixed areas like an event for example, you can call an event inbound. You ask people to come to the event
But the online world has really changed that because people are searching and they are searching for information. They’re not just searching for an item in a catalogue but they’re searching for something where they can get some additional benefits. Such as an Amazon Listing of a book where you can get a review of the book or you get a recommendation of people that have stayed in that particular apartment or house or somewhere where you want to go.
And that adds value and that’s how people today consume and based on that paradigm this Inbound Marketing has developed over the past 10 years or so.
Sarah: Okay. Excellent. What would you say are the key elements of an Inbound Marketing strategy?
Stephan: Well I’m looking at some notes I took here. One thing I mentioned already is that it needs to be useful for the user. It needs to offer benefits, information, entertainment, engagement, opportunities, that sort of thing.
So today when we work on a program with our clients, we want them to have a website and a presence on the internet, a digital presence that is marketing ready.
We do a lot of work from B to B Companies or even for NGOs and non-profits and even for them they have to think about who their customer is and they have to be engaging. Just to have a website that is sort of brochure wear as we call it, that’s just not good enough anymore today.
An effective element about Inbound Marketing is to have an engaging website. We’ll talk about that a little bit more, perhaps in a minute. And it needs to offer an engaging above average user experience. You want to be able to find what you’re looking for easily.
To download the full transcript, click HERE.