Inbound Marketing: The Fly Fishing Analogy (Digital Friday/Promotion)

Hello again, I’m Jim Glover, That Branding Guy, for Once a Day Marketing, and today is Digital Friday.

Today’s topic is "Inbound Marketing: The Fly Fishing Analogy."

Before I define inbound marketing, let’s review traditional marketing.  Under the traditional model, you create a strategy, a campaign, and advertisements directed at your target audience.  That material is typically blasted in the form of TV and radio commercials, print ads, publicity, etc. and hopefully resonates with a particular type of customer.  It is often seen as interruption marketing.  Customers may or may not want to receive your message when you are ready to send it.

In bound marketing take the opposite approach.  Your customers find you.  It is permission based marketing.  Using the power of social media, you create content and leverage websites to attract customer that are interested in your company, products and services.  The premise is that they will find your message and follow it back to you.

It’s an entirely different approach in that it can reside at a location until you choose to update or remove it.  There is an opportunity for the same message to be viewed over and over for a long period of time, where in traditional advertisement you buy print or TV ads, they run and then that campaign is finished.

This is an emerging trend.  It has been around for a while but is really taking off.  You will see a lot more inbound marketing, especially on mobile devices, where you can place the advertisement in the customer hands when they are ready to receive it.

Now that you have a good idea of what inbound marketing is, I am going to share my Fly Fishing Analogy.

Imagine you craft the perfect fly, which is your content, and you never have to create it again.

You toss in river that is your market.  It floats along and will continue to float until you remove it.

In the river are all sorts of fish, these are your potential customers.  They will notice your lure (content) and if they are interested, they may take the bait and respond to your message.

You, as the inbound marketer, will receive the lead that comes in.  Reel the customer in by respond to questions, requests for customer service, and orders with immediate follow up.

If you’ve never been a fisherman, here is your chance.  Spend time crafting your content.  The more content you have online, the more inbound responses you will generate.  That will increase your marketing exposure and your lead flow.  It’s up to you to convert those into customers.

That concludes Digital Friday and another week of Once a Day Marketing.  Join me next week for more exciting marketing and branding tips.  If you need assistance crafting your inbound marketing message, please contact me for a one on one service engagement.  I am Jim Glover, That Branding Guy, for Once a Day Marketing, and we will see you next time.

James Glover: (505) 501-1330 or onceadaymarketing@gmail.com