Inbound Marketing

Online-Marketing-Strategies2We already know the pros and cons of both traditional and online marketing. Let’s move a step further, specifically focusing on online marketing, also known as inbound marketing.

Many buyers all over the world use the internet to buy products, using sites such as Amazon.com and eBay. Even if choosing to purchase merchandise from “real world” stores, they tend to refer to the product online for review specifications to see if it meets their needs. Even though inbound marketing allows you to target a wider range of audiences worldwide, you would be surprised to learn how internet marketing and traditional marketing are similar in the sense that they are the exact opposite of each other. You can consider it be a “reflection” or “mirror image” of traditional marketing.

Flip the Switch and Relax

When marketing over the internet, the process is initiated when an individual enters a keyword in a search engine, after which the search engine directs sellers to potential buyers which appear in the order of relative importance. This tends to become one of the major issues for most traditional companies or sellers:

The buyer approaches the seller (whereas in traditional marketing it is the seller that approaches the buyer with the goal in mind of making sales and generating revenue.) This becomes a mirror reflection of traditional marketing automatically. Sellers don’t need to find buyers – buyers need to find sellers. Which, in essence, means that the seller needs to make efforts online to make sure their products pop up before their competitors’ (which is most efficiently done via Search Engine Optimisation, among other techniques). However, this requires less effort on the part of the seller in terms of “active marketing” and could prove to be more beneficial in the end.

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