Inbound Marketing: Are You Being Found?
Even in uncertain economic times, customers are still actively looking for your business as a solution for their problems. Are you being found? Are you present in the places that your customers are searching?
If your business is following the current trend, it’s likely that your sales are holding their own or declining. This may leave less money to spend on traditional marketing via advertisements, trade shows, and email blasts to paid lists. Rather than looking for short term sales increases that stop working when you stop paying, invest brain-power, time, and money into the long-term viability of your business by creating content for distribution online. This is called “inbound marketing.” The tools of the new inbound marketing techniques are blogs, social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious and more) and the time and brain power of your staff.
As defined by Hubspot, a creator of web site marketing tools, Inbound marketing is “marketing focused on getting found by customers.” This is contrasted with older forms of “outbound marketing” that focus on finding customers through advertising and other forms of paid prospecting.
Where Should I Start with Inbound Marketing?
Your ideal goal is to build a large volume of engaging, useful information that meets the needs of your potential clients while demonstrating your expertise. This content ultimately should be hosted on your main web site domain for search engine optimization purposes, but if resources are limited, you can begin with a free blog from WordPress.com. Just get started creating content and when you have the extra resources, you can hire a web developer to develop a blog on your own domain.
I recommend that you start engaging with social media by setting up a Twitter account and publishing excerpts of your blog articles along with a link to the full text of the article. However, don’t just use your Twitter account to publish links to your own content. Also do the following:
- Follow other users of interest to you and your customers
- Retweet any tweets that are interesting and relevant
- Search for keywords related to your industry and respond to those tweets with helpful information
You can also set up a Facebook page with relatively little work, but I’d recommend that as a second step after you are using Twitter effectively. Also consider using Delicious bookmarks to share what you’re reading with others. There are more techniques for engaging potential customers via social media than I can cover here. My goal is to just get you started without overwhelming you.
Inbound Marketing Is More Than Social Media
Social media engagement means you take part in a conversation that’s going on in recognized meeting places online. This is valuable, but you also want to become a destination for people who are searching for what you have to offer. To do this, you must first develop content as described above and present it in a search engine friendly manner.
You also will want to use Search Engine Optimization techniques such as keyword research to identify possible phrases potential customers use when they attempt to find your business online. There are many resources on the web for this kind of training if you’re inclined to do it yourself.
Eventually, you may want to retain a web developer who is savvy about Search Engine Optimization at some point to take your site to the next level. That said, it is amazing at how far some basic keyword research and content creation can go in marketing your business online.
In conclusion, first get started blogging as a way of creating content, next set up a Twitter account to engage potential customers and extend the reach of your blog. If you’re cash strapped, use a free service like WordPress.com to begin blogging (you can export content later to a blog on your own web site). If you have more resources, you may want to hire a WordPress developer who can integrate WordPress into your web site. I would be happy to talk to you about that.
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