We all realize that the advent of e-commerce and 24/7 social connectedness has flipped the marketing world on its head. Leads generated by traditional outbound marketing channels like radio, TV, print publications and direct mail are falling every year, even as costs keep rising. In this Brave New Digital World, inbound marketing may represent the last, best hope for overcoming those cost barriers and generating leads.

So, how do you generate leads if your business is a little...unconventional?

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

You are the admissions dean for the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.  You’re trying to attract the interest of young, excellent, magical candidates to fill out your admissions quota next year. You've done your market research and your focus groups. You know that:

• Young magic folk today are staying away from crowded, sometimes dangerous Diagon Alley and are shopping from home via the Internet. Wiseacre's Wizarding Equipment, in particular, seems to have had a lot of success generating sales leads via its new e-commerce portal, which in addition to offering quality hourglasses, invisibility cloaks and cauldrons for purchase, also has popular, free app downloads like Potion9 (a dating app), NightOwl (an entertainment finder) MapWizard (like Google Maps, but adds locations from the unseen wizarding world) and SpellBound (spells and potions wiki).
• Last year's freshman class surveys showed that the number one concern most new students had was finding their way around Hogwarts extensive grounds — especially when the staircases are notorious for moving about at random.
• Many young magic folk are also active Twitter users, which allow them to keep in touch with doings and friends in the Muggle world.

A magic strategy.

So , what's your inbound marketing strategy? Should you take to Hogwarts' Twitter account and tweet "Students! Choose Hogwarts for a magical education," or should you play to your target audience's known interests? We recommend the latter.

First, you develop (or hire an experienced inbound marketing firm to ghostwrite) a blog and post it to your portal website. This becomes your landing zone — a marketing portkey, if you will.

Your first blog entry is a review of the MapWizard app you've been hearing so many current students mention.  In the blog, you hyperlink to Wiseacre's app download page.

Your tweets looking something like this:

@HogwartsSchool

Getting lost on your way to class? Check out #MapWizard!  http://hogwartsschool.mag/blog/20140930

But What If Your Industry Isn’t Exactly Popular...

You can also use inbound marketing to attract employees to your organization, to speak to internal audiences within your company, or just to raise brand awareness. An effective inbound blog entry or social media post will pose a question that prospectives probably share, then provide a portal to an answer.

Here's how some other fictional organizations might handle inbound marketing on the social side. On the Rebel Alliance's Twitter account today:

@TheRealRebelAlliance

Why doesn't the Empire trust its own citizens? 5 things we worry about. #OccupyCoruscant http://reballiance.gal/blog/longago

@TheRealRebelAlliance

Ways to deal with a throat-grabby boss without taking a paycut. http://reballiance.gal/blog/vaderstinks

Meanwhile, on the Stark Industries blog, Pepper Potts guest wrote a blog entry that other beleaguered administrative assistant-turned-de-facto-CEOs everywhere can relate to: "Trouble with the C-Suite? How to Talk to Your Billionaire Playboy Boss About Marketing."

So, now that you know how it works….

Leave us your best example of Inbound Marketing for Fictional Organizations in the comments below!