The word marketing is usually associated with profit generating tactics; however, inbound marketing is focused on organic growth and can and should be used by associations and non-profits. The goal is to attract people to your cause or organization based on the relevance of the information you are offering your desired audience, where as outbound marketing consists of communicating to a mass audience and hoping something sticks.

As the Internet and access points continues to expand, so too does the average consumer’s aversion to traditional marketing. With products such as satellite radio and DVR making offline efforts easier to ignore, consumers no longer have to tolerate "interruption" marketing tactics. Consumers now rely on the Internet to do their research on products and services; they actively seek out products and services that they need, rather than passively interact with products outbound marketing platforms point them to.

It is imperative to develop an inbound marketing process that will capitalize on these new trends in consumer behavior. An effective inbound marketing process will provide you with a cheaper, more efficient, and more compelling way to grow traffic, generate leads, convert leads and analyze data in a way that guarantees repeatable, continuous success.

Inbound marketing is made up of many pieces. To truly succeed online, businesses need to have a comprehensive strategy including all the pieces such as:

· Blogging

· Social media engagement

· Search engine optimization (SEO)

· Landing pages

· Email marketing

· Video marketing

· Strategic website design.

an effective marketing website should be generating leads on a consistent basis, and second,if a site does in fact generate leads, the rate at which leads are generated should be improving each month. With that said, a good website allows for almost total trackability, which means most campaigns are instantly measurable. This allows for easy replication of success and fast learning from mistakes.

As a marketer, you are probably constantly thinking of innovative and new ways to advertise your product or service. You probably spend hours trying to get into the mind of the “customer” and what it is they want. We’ve all seen the Progressive commercials where Flo is manning the imaginary Progressive retail store. Each ad displays a new story of a customer in the store, while Flo uses her superb selling skills to figure out the specific needs of the customer. Everyone always leaves happy and everyone loves Flo! Wouldn’t that be fantastic to have a chance to sit with your customers face to face and figure out exactly what they want? For most businesses today, that simply is not feasible. At least not in the physical sense. We can, however, be there for our customers virtually with some quick, easy guidelines.

1. SEO:Search engine optimization is the process of affecting the visibility of your website in a search engine’s natural (unpaid) reach.

We have some really great articles on SEO, here is the most recent from Contensive News: http://www.contensive.com/Top-5-Benefits-of-SEO

2. SEM: Search Engine Marketing is marketing via search engines. For example, pay per click advertising. (This is when you post an ad that relates to the users search engine query. Each time a user clicks your ad, an amount is charged to your business.)

Here is some information on SEM and how it differs from SEO: http://www.websearchsocial.com/seo-vs-sem-whats-the-difference-why-does-it-matter-and-how-the-heck-do-you-do-them-both/

3.Real-time Assistance: Twitter allows for real time social media posts. Smart marketers have realized that reading and responding to clients on Twitter can actually be faster than going through email or support.

Virgin Atlantic uses Twitter to assist its customers, even while they are 20,000 feet above the ground: http://mashable.com/2011/11/15/virgin-atlantic-flight-status-bot-twitter/

4. Blogging and Social Media: Blogging and social media currently encompass a large percentage of marketing. Facebook and Google+ are among several social media sites that offer another avenue of branching out to clients.

Check out my past blog on inbound marketing and social media: http://www.contensive.com/Inbound-Marketing-and-Social-Media

First let’s define each…

SEM: (Search Engine Marketing) the process of gaining traffic by purchasing ads on search engines. It is also called Pay Per Click and Cost Per Click marketing as that is how the ads are sold.

SEO: (Search Engine Optimization) the process of affecting the visibility of a website in a search engines organic search results.

I started out writing a blog on SEO VS. SEM. It seemed like a strong topic at the time, so I began reading articles and researching statistics. The more I read, the more I realized that the two are actually fairly complementary to each other.

Now that we know what each of these marketing strategies are, lets talk about how they work for you.

Search engine optimization is a slow and steady process. It can take several months for results to even show up in a search engine. Search engine marketing works pretty much immediately. Its not always cheap, but it will help you drive large amounts of traffic to your webpage very quickly.

With that being said. why not use SEM to boost your website traffic while waiting on your SEO campaign to show progress? It does not hurt to add a little SEM to your marketing campaign. Think of SEM as that quick shot of espresso you take while you wait for your cup of SEO coffee to kick in.

There are many components to an effective inbound marketing strategy. With SEO, blogging, social media, and even pay per click advertising, it can be a lot to get organized. Also, if not handled properly, it becomes very easy for any of these equally important components to fall through the cracks.

Instead of Inbound Marketing giving you that extra headache and making your life more complicated, why not make it easy on yourself? Its all about planning. There are several project management tools available that have proven to be highly effective. Contensive uses Intervals, which is an online project management program allowing you access from any location. As a project manager myself, I use Intervals multiple times per day, and do not know what I would do without it.

If your business does not have the budget for a project management program, Google Calendar is highly useful, easy to organize, you can share it with multiple co-workers and best of all, it is free! A tool like this is so helpful when everyone can look at and access the inbound marketing goals and deadlines. With a strategy laid out and organized on the table, inbound marketing can become an easily manageable system.

Hubspot is also a great online tool for inbound marketing organization. They offer many free and paid articles, videos and webinars. They even offer a blog posting calendar template to help organize your blog posting schedule.

Don’t let inbound marketing overwhelm you, organization is the key to success in many things. Instead, go easy on yourself, get organized, plan ahead and soon you will see your inbound marketing campaign as a well oiled marketing machine, and not a chaotic mess.