Inbound marketing and marketing automation are types of marketing that have caught the imagination of businesses looking for a quicker softer way of managing their communications.
Many types of inbound marketing are thought to produce results for free.
Some marketing sources commonly thought to be free are:
SEO
Research / White Papers
Infographics
Social Networks
Webinars
Document Sharing
Word of Mouth
Podcasting
Q & A Sites
Type-In-Traffic
Direct / Referring Links
Social Bookmarking
Forums
Online Video
Comment Marketing
Blogs + Blogging
News / Media / PR
While I am sure repackaging these forms of marketing as free sources of traffic if not results surely sells, they are anything but free.
Why?
Because somebody somewhere in your organization had to create the original content used to communicate your firm’s initial market position.
Additionally, it wasn’t created overnight and thus any messaging product produced was the result of consistent and disciplined labor.
Unless you crowd sourced your company’s messaging, you at a minimum have ongoing sunk time costs and more than likely ongoing sustained labor costs invested in the source marketing which in turn produces the inbound or free marketing response.
There is no such thing as a free lunch nor is there any such thing as free marketing.
Inbound marketing in actuality is just the channel through which a response is received or not…
Tags: Free Marketing, Inbound Marketing Not Free, Marketing Automation
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