The communication revolution led by the new media in form of social media sites running largely on smart phones, has even led the consumers to have better options to make a purchase decision. With massive content flowing in real time at cyber space have allowed consumers to have a better opinion about a product. At the same time competitors have made the pricing of a product comparably much broader, where, a person chooses the same product from various consumer sites.
The present trend of consumerism and product selling is headed by e-commerce and retail sites and heading towards the engagement model with an inbound pitching instead of outbound approach. Now, a consumer has become reluctant to make a buying decision and requires a lot of convincing thus enabling him to become more interactive ever before.
The influence of impressive ad, cold calling and direct marketing is diminishing day-by-day, when, consumer has detailed information about a product online. He can now easily avoid traditional media like television commercials, radio ads and direct e-mails. This trend in consumer behavior has led a marketer to shift a promotional campaign, according to the consumer orientation instead of around hard pitching of product benefits and features. Consumer, listen to more merely than blah-blah. The business process seamlessly is shifting from outbound to inbound.
Inbound marketing has emerged rather a strategic approach targeting the prospective customers through the interactive content that is consumable and helpful to a customer in making the buying decisions. In the area of inbound marketing, the fields of content marketing, social media marketing and search engine optimization are being integrated to address the problems faced by consumers buying a set of product and services.
In the area of content, with respect to inbound marketing communication has gone beyond the ad copies and product description to marketing collaterals like Blogs, Ebooks, Case Studies, Whitepapers, etc., that are a better way to grab the audience attention.
With respect to ROI (Return on Investment) Inbound Marketing is far cheaper as customer retention cost is too low and further developing them to be your brand advocates.