Inbound marketing, such as television, radio, newspapers, yellow pages has been used for many years and are “standard” marketing tools. The concept is that with just one ad a company can reach thousand of potential customers, at a fixed cost. However it is a little more complex than that which is put forward. Advertising companies spend millions conduct surveys to establish demographics to reach and intended audience and then the companies must wait as long as three months to see if the advertising campaign is successful. Further, in very recent years this traditional marketing concept has come under fire with critics pointing to factors such as the number of newspapers that have gone bankrupt. At the local level advertising mediums like radio, television and even the Yellow Pages have dropped rates to the bare minimum to try and keep clients.
Now we have what is referred to as “inbound” marketing campaigns, spurred on by the use of electronic media such as Google search, Bing, Yahoo or many other computer search engines. A potential client logs onto a computer and using any one of the search engines can find what he is looking for in matter of minutes. Companies are jumping to the inbound process in droves by designing websites that can deliver to new customers at a finger touch. Perhaps the days of the standard marketing programs are more numbered than we realize.