Note:  This is a guest post by Marcia Coffey, a WordPress Designer, Inbound Marketer and Ecommerce Developer. She develops affordable responsive Word Press websites. Find Marcia on Twitter.

This is NOT good news for those of you who prefer the hard sell and printed media.

By the time your potential customer arrives at your showroom, enters your store or rummages through your many, exciting wares, 60% of the selling process has already been done.

But not by YOU! Likewise NOT by ads in newspapers or on TV, not by outdoor advertising, direct mail flyers, brochures, postcards, stickers or even car wraps!

The message or CONTENT is still critical. But the Messenger has changed platforms. It is now the Internet. And, it is the Web in all its colorful clothing, constantly changing locations, on all of  its devices … iPhones, iPads, Androids, tablets, desktops, laptops … on different size monitors and used for different purposes.

Now the Messenger is under your complete control as buyer or consumer. You make the decisions, not the salesman.

“The Message” or Content now is multi-tasking. It can be a website,  a blog post, a Facebook page, a newsletter, a tweet, a podcast, a YouTube video, a slideshow, a Pinterest page, an e-book , a Google hangout, and so it goes. Digital content has no size or time boundaries, unlike a 2 column newspaper ad.

Two More Advantages of Inbound Marketing:

• Much cheaper – by a factor of 61% – to get leads on the net than to purchase sales leads by zipcode.
• You can actually target cost-effectively and measure your audience, then edit/revise your content as needed.