What is Direct Inbound Marketing?

A Popular Hybrid Form of Internet Marketing that Effectively Increases Leads and Sales

I’m coining a new term: Direct Inbound Marketing. Why? Because it communicates a popular hybrid form of marketing quickly and succinctly.

Direct Inbound Marketing is the combination of Inbound Marketing with Direct Response Marketing. Inbound Marketing creates long term and sustainable lead generation by attracting potential clients to your online presence. While Direct Response Marketing allows for quick lead generation and outbound engagement of your entire potential market. Direct Inbound Marketing is typically practiced online, although, it is not limited to online only.

Inbound Marketing and Direct Marketing go together almost perfectly. They compliment each other in the weak areas and support each other in their strengths. Like any good marriage!

Direct Inbound Marketing Changes Everything (for the Better)

You’ve heard of social media, SEO, email marketing, content marketing, Google AdWords, and conversion rate optimization. In fact, you’re probably bombarded with bits and pieces of information on these topics every day.

Yes, it’s all (mostly) good to know. But just how does it all fit together? How do you effectively use each practice in your business and reach your lead goals?

Direct Inbound Marketing puts the pieces together for you. It is the methodology that surrounds and intertwines each of these Internet marketing practices. It shows you how to leverage each practice properly to create sales and company growth.

The Direct Inbound Marketing methodology is:

1. CREATE – Create valuable online content for your target audience. This is every piece of information you put out there online – from your website to your tweets. The official term for this practice is “Content Marketing.”
2. DRIVE – Drive qualified traffic to your content. It’s not good enough to get just any visitor. You want someone who will genuinely be interested in your product or service. Get your traffic through Search Engine Optimization and Direct Marketing efforts (Google AdWords, Direct Mail, and other advertising).
3. CONVERT – Convert your traffic into leads and sales. Getting a visitor is tough, that’s why you need to know how to turn a visitor into a customer as efficiently as possible. This is done through the practice of conversion optimization, split testing, and analysis.
4. NURTURE – Nurture your leads into loyal customers. It costs far less to get a repeat customer than it does to obtain a new customer. Nurturing your audience is critical in turning a prospect or one-time customer into an evangelist for you. Typically, practices like permission-based email marketing and social media marketing fall into this category.

The order is important too! Without good content, you won’t get traffic, without traffic, you won’t get conversions, without conversions, you won’t have any customers. Start from CREATE and work your way to NURTURE.

Continuously Improve Your Sales and Return on Investment

The point of Direct Inbound Marketing is not to neglect any stage. You’ll want to continuously learn, evolve, and improve every aspect of your marketing strategy.

I think marketing, at its core, is about knowing your customers. Who they are, what they value, where they live, why they buy, and how they find you. Every marketing technique becomes more effective when you can directly address your customers pain points, needs/wants, and motivations.

You can conjecture about your customers and guess at what type of people they are. You might be right about a lot of it. The fact remains, your customers will always surprise you. There is always something new to learn about them and their buying habits.

If you focus solely on Inbound Marketing it will take too long to learn new things about your customers. Use Direct Marketing to learn quickly and then adjust your long term strategy.

A Direct Marketing piece is too short-lived and is time sensitive. Use Inbound Marketing to build up your online equity and allow your offer to be there whenever your prospect wants it.

No matter what, you can’t stop creating, driving, converting, or nurturing. Like a row of dominoes, push one over and the others will come tumbling down. Direct Inbound Marketing is a continuous improvement model.

Try a Direct Inbound Marketing Strategy and Reap the Results

The lead generation and return on investment benefits of Inbound Marketing and Direct Marketing are very impressive. Direct Inbound Marketing brings in the best of both worlds. Making it, by far, the most effective type of marketing for lead generation and ROI.

You can see what the statistics, strengths, and weaknesses are for both Inbound Marketing and Direct Marketing in parts 1 and 2 of this series.

What do you think of Direct Inbound Marketing? Are you practicing this in your organization? Do you think the term might catch on? Please leave your thoughts and comments below!