To understand what an Inbound Marketing System (or a Digital Marketing System) can do for your company, you have to start with what it isn’t. Unlike more traditional forms of marketing, inbound marketing is not about putting something in front of you when you weren’t looking for it. It’s about putting something in front of you because you were looking for it. Traditional marketing does not require your permission to show you something, inbound marketing does. It’s overwhelming success depends on this simple truth: “People prefer a form of advertising that asks their permission first.”
An Inbound Marketing system does two things based on the “permission” principle stated above. First, it applies a “search engine optimization” method that “pulls” you in from a search engine to look at something on a website – because you were looking for it. Secondly, it “pushes” something in front of you because you joined a social media platform like Facebook, and agreed to be be shown something while you are there.
Like an Inbound Marketing System, this is how a Digital Marketing System works:
Back in the day, before the rise of social media in 2004, search engine optimization consisted of designing structured content targeting a set of keywords and creating as many incoming links as possible. A page in a website was considered optimized if it had the right meta tags, image alt tags, a certain level of keyword density and so on. These content related methods, combined with link research, (along with a host of other factors) pretty much guaranteed a high ranking in the search engines and a significant amount of traffic. While this type of SEO can still “pull” in a significant amount of traffic to a site, the site is limited if it can’t “push” its structured content onto the social media platform.
If you’re just starting out with a new domain name and building everything from scratch, an Inbound Marketing System will not only create structured content that search engines love, but for any social media platform you belong to. The centrepiece of any Inbound Marketing System is the blog or posting engine which creates the necessary structured content. When you use it to build your presence on social media you raise your ranking in the search engines.