Traditional forms of marketing including the Yellow Pages, direct mail, billboards, and sign spinners are out dated and simply put, are not receiving the ROI (return on investment) that is being seen with inbound marketing.
I myself receive the Yellow Pages twice every year and receive direct mail shoved into my mailbox daily. Both go directly into the trash. I don’t even glance at them. I do feel bad for two reasons (1) I feel bad for the company still paying for these traditional types of marketing and (2) I feel even worse for all the trees still being cut down.
I’ve even gone as far as contacting my state legislators requesting a law that would require the Yellow Pages and all direct mail pieces to provide both a phone number and an email or website where receivers can go to request these mailings to stop; however, nothing ever became of it. But props to cities like San Francisco for taking the lead and finally banning the Yellow Pages. These bold moves by cities are only contributing to the fact that paper marketing is slowly dieing… as it should be.
Inbound marketing includes blogs such as TechCrunch, RSS, YouTube, Technorati; SEO including Bing, Google and Yahoo! and Social Media; including Facebook Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp and Foursquare are the new marketing medium. Check out this video that show the social media statistics that are pretty alarming. If your business is not already on all 5 of these social media platforms, you better get started!
Of course out of all of the inbound marketing examples above, Google is the one that everyone wants to know more about, as they should. This is the #1 search engine and 2nd is YouTube, which is also owned by Google.
One of the best ways to increase the marketing efforts for your business is to take advantage of free tools that Google offers. Check out this blog post on the 9 free Google tools that will help you move your business forward.
If you need any assistance, you can always call us directly at 1-855-SMMcast. We want to help you take the lead in your industry.
