Israel EnriquezHasn't it ever happened to you that you walk into a store and a salesman approaches to tell you all about the products that you can buy, up to the point that they are annoying you?
It has happened to me more than once, so the most courteous response I come up with to keep the poor man wasting his saliva unnecessarily on me, is to say: "I'm just looking around, thank you".
One of the reasons why I love Inbound Marketing, it's because it perfectly understands the selling premise: Clients like to shop, not to get something sold to them.
This is because nobody likes to feel with an obligation to buy, or worse, to buy things that we don't want just because the seller was too invasive. When that's the case, we end up buying something from him just so that he would stop bothering us or because he "took the trouble" of explaining the whole thing to us, from a to z, about everything he sells.
Inbound Marketing is mainly focused on catching a client's attention in the most subtle and convenient way, by solving his concerns or challenges. We all search and find exactly what we want, whenever we want it.
In this information era where we find so much about everything, this point of view is very valuable and we can take advantage of it for our businesses.
As a company owner, you can become so attractive that people actually look for you, specifically on the field in which you'll become an opinion leader, specialist or expert by solving people's concerns and talking about things they are interested in.
Let's take a footwear company for women as an example. An inbound strategy would focus on generating content that is useful to women who want to buy (at this time or in the future) shoes. A line of action is to create blogs to talk about:
- the different shoe models that you have
- trends by season
- other garments to match them with
- what things to consider when buying shoes
- the balance between orthopedic health and style
Just to mention a few...
The logic behind this is that, if a woman is interested in buying shoes, she'd like to first have all the information she need in order to make her final purchasing decision. She'd like to make sure that the shoes that she's buying will give her total satisfaction and fulfill her expectations.
Another example of applying the philosophy of Inbound Marketing, are companies that want to publicize their organizational culture, as well as the achievements they are having as a company and how these have a very positive impact on their product or service by improving their quality. We can also share those practices that mean a benefit for us all in a company, since sharing good work practices helps us replicating them, improving them, and also invites us to constantly prepare ourselves in order to continue being the market leaders in our sector.
Understanding that Inbound is a philosophy, makes life easier for sellers and consumers.
Inbound is a conversation, and being "the conversation" is what keeps us in people's minds.
“People do not buy goods & services. They buy relations, stories & magic” Seth Godin
