Customer Experience.com

inbound marketing

By Tim Ehrens

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is a strategy that focuses on attracting customers, or leads, via company-created internet content, thereby having potential customers come to the organization rather than marketers vying for their attention.

This type of marketing makes it easier for customers, who are already actively looking for goods or services on the internet, to find what an organization offers. The term was coined by HubSpot in 2005.

How does inbound marketing work?

Inbound marketing targets customers through online platforms such as blogs, social media and search engines. This marketing strategy is intended to create content that shows up in these places to drive organic traffic, as opposed to paid advertising-driven traffic, to an organization's website.

A main way in which traffic is generated is through inbound links, a search engine optimization (SEO) practice that directs users to a webpage from internal sources. These links maximize the visibility of content on search engines and other websites by boosting that content's ranking in search results.

Examples of inbound marketing content and tactics include the following:

Benefits of inbound marketing

Inbound marketing offers organization the following benefits:

Challenges of inbound marketing

Despite its benefits, inbound marketing can challenge organizations in the following ways:

Editor's note: This article was written by Tim Ehrens in 2014. TechTarget editors revised it to improve the reader experience.

17 May 2023

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