There are 2 types of marketing:
- Outbound marketing (ads)
- Inbound marketing (content marketing)
Outbound Marketing: An example is paying for ads, where you ‘hunt down’ customers who are ready to buy with your paid ads.
Inbound Marketing: This is when you create helpful content around your niche. The point of this is to not necessarily get sales but to build trust with your target audience. When your audience is ready to buy, you’d be top of their mind & come to you.
Unless you’re already super famous around a topic, most of your customers will not buy from you right away. They would need a lot of exposure to your brand (through content).
Take a look at your customer’s buying journey below. Your product or service is located at the bottom of the funnel.
In order for your ideal clients to decide that your product or solution is the best to solve their problems, they have to go through a few layers of that funnel.
The helpful content marketing that you do will tackle all objections at each stage.
However, running ads (outbound marketing) typically only target the smallest group of your customers, who are the people ready to buy.
Unlike the immediate sales of running ads, inbound content marketing takes a long time to bear fruit. But once it does, you’ll get free sustainable inbound leads & customers for years.
A good marketing strategy will be to use both inbound & outbound together. However, this course will focus on inbound content marketing, where you’ll build a name for yourself online on a topic of your choice.
The person creating the content, which is you, is referred to as the Content Creator.