Scalability is a term that’s very familiar for most companies in the technology world. We all understand how scalability applies to a network, a system or a process to enable expansion and contraction to meet the demands of the business.
What’s less familiar for many IT professionals, however, is how scalability applies to the marketing of your company. Just how do you adjust your promotions to match the inevitable highs and lows so you aren’t committing budget during times when you have a slump but are still able to step up your efforts when the occasion calls for it?
With inbound marketing, that’s how.
Why Inbound Marketing is Scalable
Inbound marketing is useful because of the flexibility it offers compared with traditional methods. Once you’ve identified and refined the various marketing processes that work, you can reproduce them and adapt them for new target audiences and new products, as well as changing conditions.
Here are 4 ways inbound marketing complies with the requirements for scalability:
#1: Inbound is Agile
There’s no “one-size-fits-all” approach to information technology, so why should there be for your marketing? With inbound, every campaign, every piece of content and each customer persona can be tested and adapted individually. You can add new strategies, technologies and media as you need to, in order to reach your target audience through the channels they access. Whether it’s customized, downloadable content, social media platforms or video, you can include what works into your campaigns.
#2: It’s Measurable
Measurability is one of the cornerstones of scalability. You wouldn’t consider a network or system successful unless it was able to adapt to changing conditions, right? And to do that, you need to be able to measure the effectiveness of the protocols to know how and what to adapt. With inbound marketing, you can measure exactly what is working and determine the reasons why, then scale up or down accordingly to get the most out of every aspect of your campaign.
#3: It’s Customer-Centric
The vast majority of IT customers have a modern outlook. They relate well to the virtual environment and they don’t want to be “sold” to. They’re strong online users who know how to use digital tools to find what they want, and they prefer to initiate contact themselves. With inbound marketing, you can match your efforts to the way your ideal customer thinks, by:
- making sure your website is up-to-date, searchable and interactive
- using social media marketing to attract visitors and drive traffic
- publishing quality content regularly to provide useful information and build thought leadership in your industry
- building an email marketing database for the purpose of nurturing leads through the buying process until they are ready to close the deal
The scalability factor is essential to customer centricity to enable you to provide the same levels of quality communications, regardless of how many—or how few—prospective clients you’re dealing with.
#4: It’s Cost-Effective
This is probably one of the primary factors in scalability—having the power to adjust your marketing spend according to your financial situation. With inbound marketing, you’re not only able to do much more with much lower spend than with traditional marketing, but you’re also able to scale your expenditure up or down at will. Targeting a large potential client who has specific needs? Scale up your content in their niche and increase your social media activity to suit. New business slow during the holidays? Scale up or down depending on whether you’re taking a vacation or pushing for new customers. Whatever you do, you pay only for what you get. Inbound marketing has a huge advantage over traditional marketing in this respect, because you’re not footing the bill for promotions that get ignored by vast numbers of people.
Interested yet? There’s much that inbound marketing can do to be scalable for the world of IT. Like Nike says, just do it. It starts with your website. Build one that performsI
