Inbound concept’s been around for quite a while now, from the days when marketing mag Seth Godin published his “Permission Marketing”  although only recently it’s been spinning heads of everyone involved in marketing or sales.

A beautiful thing about inbound as a concept is that your customers don’t experience “in your face” marketing anymore. By this I mean cold calling and generally contacting anyone out of the blue, perhaps at an inconvenient time, leaving them very little room to make an informed decision.

After getting introduced to inbound you’ll wonder how did you ever do business before.

1. Everything becomes easier

Simply put – yes. Everything gets easier when it comes to acquiring and nurturing clients, both from marketing and sales side. These two functions work in collaboration and not separately. Before, marketing was meant to mainly put the word out there, build the brand, help improve the product offer based on feedback, to name a few.

And what comes to your mind when I say “sales”? Probably a guy who calls you at the worst moment to offer you baby strollers (and you’ve been single since 2004).

Using feedback from sales team, marketing can create more highly-engaging content to attract your key clients.

2. Inbound is working (also) when you sleep

Content is working for you even when you sleep, even when you can’t pick up the phone to call your clients or prospects.

If your content is good enough to fight the noise and is out there, it will be found.

If what you have to say doesn’t solely scream about your product but can benefit someone, people will share it.

Every time someone shares what you wrote, your reach amplifies by the number of people in their network. That’s how things go viral and that’s how you reach who you need to reach. Make your content impossible to ignore.

3. You become more credible

It’s very difficult to fight against the noise in the online space especially now that audience’s attention is so precious. People use filters, ad blockers or generally just scroll away from something that doesn’t look interesting.

Creating quality, engaging and helpful content is the first milestone to captivate attention and help someone. Prospects will come to you because you showcased how you can solve their challenges and they want more. Once you reach your target prospect with content that’s relevant for them, you will reach other prospects as well.

4. You save time but increase engagement

Since you want to achieve large-scale outreach and engagement, you’ll need to have tools to help you automate the process. Don’t worry, your messages won’t sound dehumanized because you have to create them first.

Tools like HubSpot can help you personalize nurturing messages. You can put your prospects in different workflows that will, based on their behaviour, send different messages suitable for each situation e.g. send an e-book, follow-up e-mail or a reminder for you to take an action.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you will be closing deals by doing nothing. Once lead is nurtured and ripe for becoming a customer that’s when you come into picture. Now you know what your prospects need, how they behave and that they are ready to buy because you let them inform themselves and decide.

Automation will save you lots of time to create more engaging content, upscale your current accounts and prepare yourself for the next big win.

*Bonus: Employee engagement

This is not an obvious benefit but if you are a small organization just starting your inbound journey, you might not want to put all of the burden on your marketing or sales guy/girl.

Since inbound is based on good content you can offer a chance to your team to take an hour or two per week to write a blog post, contribute to an e-book or create an e-mail template.