Good news — the latest rage in promoting your business is called inbound marketing, and it means having your customers come to you.
It’s a legitimized strategy that eschews everything practical (and therefor tedious and painful) about outbound marketing: the cold calls, the fliers, the blanket advertisements…and all the costs associated with them.
Inbound marketing instead focuses on utilizing content, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media to bring potential customers right to your business.
It’s suave, more efficient, and most importantly, cheaper. Here are the top five effective inbound marketing techniques:
1. Have content. Like, totally awesome content.
Content is the bread and butter of effective websites. This means pertinent, genuine, in-house content. The CEO should blog, and visitors should know the site is human and constantly updated. Videos and white papers are even better if you’ve got the resources.
2. Use keywords in that content.
Think of your four favorite words relating to your business. Now repeat them in a blog post. Beautiful, your keyword optimized. All right, that’s an extreme example. Don’t do that. But do make a point to include the phrases that you’d imagine people searching for in your content.
3. Be optimized.
If you’re a bakery in Boston and you’ve got the clout, feel free to include something like “best bakery in boston” several times. Web-searches (i.e. future customers) love those types of searches, and the more your content utilizes search engine optimization (SEO), the more likely you are to show up in Google and Bing.
4. Share.
Share your links with like-minded businesses and reciprocate. No reason a knife company can’t link to a fork company’s site if the fork company does the same. B2B is key.
5. Be social.
Have a Facebook page and a X (formerly Twitter) feed — and use them.