Inbound Marketing Blog

In digital marketing, some things change fast. That's doubly true during a global pandemic.

Businesses are investing more in digital, and customers are showing a preference toward increasingly digital and personalized experiences, as well as fast service that enables them to engage on their time.

These trends lend themselves perfectly to inbound marketing—inviting marketers to provide content and advertising that is increasingly tailored to individual consumers or accounts.

In this article, we’ve updated the advice we originally provided in 2019, 2020, and 2021 and added new strategies to help you refresh your digital marketing efforts for 2022.

You’ve probably heard terms like “inbound marketing,” “content marketing,” and “digital marketing” tossed around but didn’t know precisely what they meant or the methodology behind those strategies.

In this article, we’re going to dig into what inbound marketing is, how it works, and how it differs from traditional or “outbound” marketing.

Marketers, like everyone, were blindsided by the pandemic. New research from LinkedIn suggests that B2Bs in particular were more likely than B2Cs to have had their marketing budgets reduced while simultaneously facing more pressure to invest in short-term tactical marketing.

Throughout the pandemic, businesses confined to a mostly online existence funneled more resources into their web presence to keep marketing momentum going. B2Bs accustomed to spending thousands on trade shows, conferences, and other in-person channels have shifted that spend to online channels to keep pipelines full.

You’re in the middle of planning content. If you’re already overwhelmed with keywords, topics, and content ideas, analyzing your competitors’ content might seem like one more tedious process.

However, researching your competitors is an opportunity to uncover their strengths and weaknesses and identify topics they either haven’t written about or haven’t written about well. With this juicy intel, you can seize open opportunities and beat competitors out of search positions by arming the audience with more or better information.

Here’s how to do it:

If you’re a small to mid-sized brand, competing with industry heavyweights online (and elsewhere) can seem like a virtually impossible task. Search for any popular product or service and it doesn’t take long to realize big brands have a chokehold on the basic keywords people are searching for.

Depending on what these keywords are, this big brand dominance can consume the entire front page of results and beyond.

Want to reach out and present your franchise opportunity to a wider audience of prospective business owners?

What makes your franchise stand out? If you don’t know, that’s a problem.

No matter what role you play in your company, when business growth slows (or stops altogether) it’s everyone’s job to throw their hat in the ring and find a better approach.

Quick question: If you were about to play a game of darts with a friend — and let’s just say for the sake of argument there’s some money riding on this — would you pause to put on a blindfold before throwing the first dart?