Inbound and Inbound Marketing

Lupo has been busy posting articles about inbound marketing and how inbound is a fundamental methodology and concept behind a rock solid growth strategy and plan.

Some of our followers have commented that they do not understand what ‘inbound’ is and therefor what Inbound marketing is? Today I’ll explain through a simple metaphor that anyone can understand.

Think of traffic that moves in an out of a city. 

Below are some images.
I live in Sydney, Australia, the state is New South Wales but this could also be California in the USA or any other major city.

In Sydney, transport management includes: trains, roads, maritime and air.

This is Sydney’s traffic control networks centre:

Traffic Signals control our roads:

This is a view of the Airport control centre:

Then, Sydney Metro trains control centre:

The point here is that there are multiple channels to consider from which all traffic is either leading into the city (headed inbound) as inbound traffic, or traffic heading away from the city, headed outbound (outbound traffic). Inbound or inbound marketing relates to a businesses or organisations traffic in the same way as traffic in a transportation system.

Each marketing channel i.e. paid media, social media, blog, email etc is like each transport mode, each responsible for generating, managing and monitoring traffic. Traffic headed inbound or outbound where the city is the centre of the transport system could represent a business or organisations website.

Passengers can get onto the transport system, anywhere in their journey, in any direction. Passengers will also choose their journey and therefor will choose their method and mode of transport be it by bus, train, boat, car, plane etc.

For a business or organisation it is important to be able to aggregate traffic or at times simply track a single user's efforts across various channels to determine the most significant signal. What inbound traffic headed to their business or organisation? It's also useful to know which traffic left and headed outbound, for example if we wished to bring this traffic back in, we might need to direct marketing attention to remarketing.

For Sydney transport management, each different traffic control channel runs it's own traffic centre which flow into a central traffic management centre in order to control and mange over all data.

Regardless of direction they are traveling or mode of transport, imagine tracking one single passenger from one central location across all transportation centres, as passengers tap on and off.  Imagine locating one passenger at any point in time - their history, past movements, previous trips, points of origin and destinations travelled, all trip data - collated. What a game changer.

In the same way it is important for a business to be able to centrally track, monitor and manage each separate channel. This is where Lupo recommends a platform like Hubspot (please also refer to our other blogs for inbound marketing software and tools).

As time goes on, each control centre has become more sophisticated and since we entered the age of Artificial intelligence (AI) and forensic data we now have access to amazing assets that inform into predictive patterns of future passenger infrastructure i.e. light rail or passenger drones?

Hopefully this metaphor has conveyed a really simple explanation on Inbound Marketing, so all you have to do is think of inbound and inbound marketing as traffic control in your city, and this can help you navigate your inbound journey from this point forward.

Joining the inbound movement gives you immediate access to future forward opportunities and next level growth.

Lupo Digital is a sales and marketing growth team that specialises in digital sales, service and inbound marketing, helping organisations with their client engagement, online inbound experience and building strong ongoing relationships with their prospects and clients. 

For more information about how inbound marketing works for your organisation, download our executive guide to inbound marketing.