This is the first article in a series of blog posts about inbound marketing and how your business can benefit from it.

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is a marketing technique to promote your business by bringing visitors in. Unlike traditional marketing where marketers will pay for ads, cold-call and buy attention, inbound marketing promotes businesses by producing information that is useful to potential customers. Potential customers are then converted into paying customers.

When using inbound marketing, content you produce should be personalized for the people reading it in order to attract customers for your market segment. Inbound marketing is also multi-channel, because your efforts will encompass mediums where your customers are.

Here are some techniques to promote your business using inbound marketing:

• Blog Posts - Write blog posts that are useful for your target segments. What are their wants and needs? What are the problems they are trying to solve?

• Social Media - Post and interact with customers on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites. A lot of customer service interactions are performed over social media in today's fast-paced environment. Use these interactions to provide the best service so that strangers can be converted into paying customers.

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) - Being found on search engines such as Google is a must for any business. Ensure that the content you create is useful as those are the types of content that Google encourages. After all, people searching on Google are looking for useful content to learn something or to solve a problem.

• Webpages - Whether your business provides services and products offline or online, a well designed webpage is a must. According to IDC, 334.4 million smartphones were shipped in the first quarter of 2015. Many developing countries are skipping the landline/broadband revolution and jumping straight into the wireless/mobile revolution. In addition, a lot of people now use their smart phones to surf the internet and find information. Make sure that your website is responsive and is able to serve customers both on desktop and mobile devices.

If you do not have social media accounts, we encourage you to open them today. Social media has low barriers to entry and you can start interacting with your customers today.

In our next post, we will be talking about some useful tools that you can use for inbound marketing.

Boostport allows you to easily build beautiful websites to serve customers on desktop and mobile devices in just a few clicks. You can also create as many blogs as your business needs to keep your customers updated and attract new customers. Getting started only takes less than 6 seconds!

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