It’s no secret: traditional marketing techniques are getting less effective every day. For example, how many people answer their phone without looking at whose calling? People likely will not answer if it’s a call they don’t recognize so it’s safe to say that telemarketing is pretty much dead. Direct mail hasn’t fared much better. The average U.S. household gets 40 pounds of direct mail per year, and the sad part is that 41% of that mail never gets opened. It goes straight to the landfill.

Perhaps the only viable alternative is inbound marketing – the kind of marketing you’d want done to you. By creating relevant content that people actually want to seek out, you can position your company for long-term success. In contrast to traditional advertising, you haven’t paid your way into someone’s life. You have to earn it. So here’s some advice on how a business can get started on inbound marketing that will keep their organization interesting in the eyes of their customers.

Test the premise.

If your company has been reliant on paid search advertising, try shifting a small amount of your ad budget toward inbound marketing. This way companies are able to displace more and more of their ad budget with the content they’re creating. The nice thing is that when you do pay-per-click, you’re renting attention, and as soon as you stop paying rent, you won’t get that visibility anymore. But if you write a blog article today that’s really good and useful, even if you stop writing tomorrow, it will continue to deliver traffic. Basically it’s an asset that keeps delivering.

Master the content.

The most common mistake businesses make is to focus too much on self-promotion, rather than focusing on their customers. Ask yourself what the customer is looking for, what questions they have, what they need to learn about the industry, what problem are they having. For example, in the early days of HubSpot, the company literally forbade their bloggers from mentioning the company in their posts. HubSpot never ran promotions and never talked about pricing. Their focus was on customers’ concerns (rather than self-promotion) and it really paid off; they now employ more than a half-dozen staffers just to create content.

Find your medium.

Different social media channels work for different companies – so try a variety and measure the impact. Some companies with visual products may do really well with Pinterest; others may excel with podcasts. Experiment and do more of what works. Also try not to be afraid of video. The reservation folks have is they believe in order to do video well, you have to have high production values; but that’s not true. We live in the age of YouTube. And as long as it’s interesting and useful; production values don’t count for all that much. Most people have a perfectly acceptable video device sitting in their pocket: their iPhone. So you can turn the camera on yourself, have someone interview you, or take a video at a conference. People overthink how hard it is to use video, but really it’s as simple as using your iPhone.

Keep it simple.

With the rise of mobile, businesses should focus on what matters – the content, not “dressing around the content.” In recent years, web design often bordered on the precious: It was very focused on being pixel-perfect, with just the right shade of blue. That may have been an acceptable indulgence in the past – but now it represents a fundamental hindrance. What people care about is content. They don’t care about fancy graphics; that gets in the way. What you want is elegant, fast, simple design.

In order for companies to really market themselves in the 21^st century, they need to let go of the 20^th century market strategy. By following the aforementioned basic principles, companies will be able to keep themselves interesting and keep from being ignored.