Yet another fancy marketing term. This one refers to various strategies used to help you connect with your target audience. The traditional advertising approach (we'll call it "outbound marketing") has been to promote your brand via magazine / print ads, tv commercials, junk mail, billboards etc. The commonality with all of these approaches is that they are uninvited and often intrusive. Inbound marketing flips this model upside down. Instead of intruding or interrupting, it creates content that is appealing to a specific demographic and publishes it in such a way that it is extremely easy to find. The two basic steps in any inbound marketing campaign are:

one:

content development (creating content that is appealing to your demographic) this content might include vidoes, white papers, blog entries etc.

two:

publishing, getting your content out there via search engine optimization, social networking sites like linked-in, facebook, twitter, html newsletter subscriptions etc...

Like a magnet, Inbound marketing attracts a specific audience that is already searching. Like a shotgun, outbound marketing reaches out to a broad audience hoping to connect with the few who will be interested. There is a place for both approaches, one is not "better" than another, although when considering your marketing goals one is often more "appropriate"