While the concept of “Inbound Marketing” isn’t new, I’ve found thru recent conversations with multiple people that very few people outside of the digital marketing space still don’t know what Inbound Marketing is.

To appreciate/understand why Inbound Marketing is of such growing importance, you need to understand the following concept/fact, that is; consumers have a growing ability to “block out” your advertising thru multiple forms of ad-blocking technologies.

These days; the consumer has many tools to “block out” multiple forms of advertising … some ad-blocking technologies have become so good, that it is rendering some forms of advertising nearly useless … and not only are different types of ad-blocking technologies proliferating – the adoption rate of ad-blocking technologies with consumers is very high.

Some examples of consumer ad-blocking technologies include;

• Caller ID; Allows blocking/avoidance of Tele-Marketers on your phone,
• DVR; Allows skipping/blocking of TV commercials,
• Software Ad Blockers; Allows blocking of Internet Banner Ad’s, Affiliate Marketing links, Pixel Tracking, and Adware,
• Email Spam Filters; Allows blocking of Email marketing.

In addition to the growing number of ad-blocking technologies, we are also currently in a era of “information overload” – where there’s an endless supply of free news & information on the internet – which is rendering newspaper ad’s and flyers increasingly ineffective … just think; how often do you read the local newspaper & flyers that come in your home mailbox these days?; 10 or 20 years ago, I use to read the local newspaper regularly when it arrived in the mailbox, but I hardly ever read it now – it just goes straight into the recycling/garbage bin.

An Inbound Marketing strategy has become increasingly vital because consumers are blocking your ad’s in increasing numbers with increasingly effective ad-blocking technologies … Inbound Marketing works because it by-passes ad blocking technology – when done correctly.

Inbound Marketing is essentially the creation of very high quality free content the consumer finds useful/relevant to their needs – that essentially pulls consumers into your website because of the quality/value your content offers.

Inbound Marketing is essentially about the production & sharing of free useful/relevant information that helps people – and not about the production of colorful sales brochure type content.

In addition to getting around ad-blocking technology; another benefit of Inbound Marketing is; it’s cheaper to produce than traditional marketing campaigns – multiple studies show that Inbound Marketing costs aprox. 1/2 compared to traditional advertising.

The following video provides a short but good summary on Inbound Marketing for someone new to the concept … this video presentation is done by Brain Halligan, the CEO of HubSpot who is often considered one of the originators of the Inbound Marketing concept …