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If you don’t already have an inbound marketing strategy, then there’s a good chance that you’re missing out on lots of potential business. In fact, if you’re not already implementing an inbound marketing strategy, and your competitors are, there’s a good chance that you’re going to notice them overtaking you in leaps and bounds!

Before you panic too much though, let’s look at what inbound marketing is, and how you can leverage it in your marketing efforts.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a term that describes a marketing system where your customers find you, instead of you going out there, knocking on doors, looking for them.

The system is based on the fact that the Internet is a vast, sprawling information ‘landfill’ rather than a superhighway, and the concept that you can funnel Internet users onto your website by implementing an inbound marketing strategy.

It’s a system that allows you to create content that captures the very market you are looking to enter or retain, and to channel internet users who are looking for the very services and products you decide to your website, or through your front door.

How Does Inbound Marketing Work?

When people and companies develop an inbound marketing strategy, the first thing they do is sit down and think about what their customers and potential customers are likely to be looking for when they are online. In most cases, that will be some form of information, and that’s why a large portion of inbound marketing is based on information marketing.

The next step in inbound marketing is to develop content that answers the questions your customers and prospects are asking, and creating a ‘network’ of that sort of information on the Internet – on your website, on site directories, article directories and elsewhere.

There are technical aspects to the average inbound marketing plan, such as deciding which keywords and phrases to target, and how to go about it, but the crux of any good inbound marketing strategy is to answer the burning questions your prospects are asking. That results in them visiting your website, and from there, they go from being an anonymous Internet user, to a real potential client.

Then What?

Most people can wrap their heads around the first part of the inbound marketing strategy – getting visitors to their site. Many, however, struggle with the next step, which is to keep them in contact with you.

The secret to good inbound marketing is not to get the most unique visitors to your site, it’s to get a large, steady stream of repeat visitors. That means giving your visitors a reason to stay in contact. Maybe you host an interesting blog about industry news. Maybe you offer a free newsletter, or perhaps you send out special offers.

Whatever it is that you do, a successful inbound marketing strategy relies on finding people who are already interested in what you are selling, channeling them to your site, and then keeping them coming back, over and over again.

Most business owners these days know that inbound marketing is the most cost effective, highest return form of marketing out there – when done correctly. However, when it comes to finding an inbound marketing tactic that really works wonders, many struggle to make sense of the mountains of conflicting information out there.

To make things a little simpler, we’re giving you the best inbound marketing tactic ideas, so that you can streamline your plan, and focus only on what’s important.

Focus On Your Visitors

Too often companies that want to try inbound marketing focus on the old ‘sales’ idea of telling your prospects what you want them to know. Successful inbound marketing, however, works the other way around. It’s based on giving your visitors what they want to know. Inbound marketing is information marketing, and if you tell people what they want to know, you will see results.

Give Something Away If You Want to Get More in Return

One of the biggest problems most business owners have with the fundamental inbound marketing tactics at first is the notion of giving something away. They struggle to work out how paying good money to create a free product or offer will result in sales. However, customers love a freebie – even if it’s a digital one, and giving something high quality away for free is the quickest way to build traffic and a loyal prospect base.

Quality Trumps Quantity

If you’ve spent any amount of time on the internet at all, you will have noticed that there are plenty of sites out there that are serving up half-baked content. They may succeed in the short term, by building keywords and even page rank, but anyone who lands on their site will quickly realize that they are being short changed. It’s always better to spend a little more, and build your online content slower, whether on your site or elsewhere, than it is to serve up recycled, badly created content.

Have a Strategy – But Don’t Be Married to It!

Another hurdle that those new to inbound marketing tactics struggle with is the notion that unlike conventional marketing, inbound marketing strategies change all the time. They’re supposed to. In fact, if you’re doing a good job of tracking results, and monitoring conversions and customer contact, you will find that your inbound marketing tactics change very regularly indeed.

The fact is that inbound marketing is the one form of marketing that lends itself to rapid evolution. It makes it possible to change your strategy at a moment’s notice, without spending a fortune. It’s cumulative, so you can start small, and build from there. It’s interactive, allowing you to get feedback from your prospects every step of the way.

One could almost say that there’s no such thing as the wrong inbound marketing tactic – as long as you’re doing something, you’re taking a step in the right direction, so whether you’re looking to test the waters, or dive right in, why not start today?

In conversations with different types of businesses, from small to large, we usually encounter at some point, the evaluation of how their company website is being used to educate, promote, and start a conversation with new prospects.

I’ve noticed an interesting trend however, that many people are obsessed with the idea of having their website rank #1 on Google (search engines). Is this always a good strategy? Not really. The following is why.

Ranking high on search engines never “guarantees” new business leads

Little side disclaimer here: One of my ‘sweet spots’ is being able to help clients rank very high on search engines, particularly when we concentrate on the ‘low hanging fruit’ that their competitors are overlooking. So, ranking high on search engines, is a viable strategy, when used correctly.

What happens when someone does a search and clicks on one of the first few results (usually in the top 5)? They are looking for something specific and if what they are looking for isn’t there, they hit the back button.

I’ve seen it happen where people focus on ranking high for very general search terms and the pages where their searchers land are on very generic and general landing pages. Nuh uh, doesn’t work. Watch the bounce rates, which indicate how quickly the visitor is apt to back out, skyrocket.

What is the goal then, sir?

The goal is relevancy. If you can “get into the mind” of your future client and think like they do, imagine yourself sitting there looking for an answer to your problem. After all, your prospects have a real business problem they are trying to solve, right? If your content, images, and layout speak to them in a simple and impactful way, you have their attention. Now it’s their turn to tell you if they are genuinely interested or not in learning more and perhaps getting more information from you: a new sales & marketing lead.

Take a step back for a minute, really evaluate

Are you getting lower results than you were expecting from your website? If so, there is a reason. Usually, it’s right there before you.

Here are three ways to evaluate, quickly what step to take next to improve it so you can start generating the kind of results you need:

• Take a step back and look away from your screen – get out a whiteboard or piece of blank paper and write out what your ideal prospect is likely to look for. You probably even know some of the exact things since you have had conversations with past clients before they became a client.
• Ask for an objective perspective – you aren’t a genius with everything right? Why then would you expect yourself to know everything about sales and marketing? Ask a third party for their opinion.
• Survey your community – Your community consists of your social reach, being social media followers, blog subscribers, email newsletter readers, leads and more. Ask them as well for their opinions. They know and can help. People like to be asked their opinions. Call them on the phone too for a personal touch.

Stop thinking and start doing, but don’t be reacting

We can all be guilty of overthinking at times. When you consistently over-evaluate a situation or try to perfect something to the point it’s starting to blur, that is when you need to be doing it.

Sales and marketing results don’t happen with in-action. Especially in the real time, Internet speed PR world we live in. David Meerman Scott could tell you all about the fast-paced way news and public relations (blogging, social media, press) happen. Oh wait, he wrote a book on this I think.

There are times to be cautious, but try to be a little more daring, more human, less corporate, less ‘big business’. Heck most of the conversations I have with managers at large businesses, they are trying to figure out how to make their messages more personal and less ‘boring’.

Most of all question the status quo. If something online isn’t giving you results, look at it and do something that will work. Keep trying but keep measuring.

Learn to love the data that is available to you. Breathe it in. Use it to your advantage.

What barriers exist to overcoming your top challenges in sales and marketing? What are your top challenges?

A recent chart from MarketingSherpa (see below) shows analysis from marketers and their top barriers to overcoming B2B marketing challenges. Let’s discuss the information and how to overcome the challenges.

Barriers vary from external forces, but many are internal

Some of the key takeaways from the chart and survey from MarketingSherpa:

• 62% of all marketers surveyed identify lack of resources in staffing, budgeting or time as the greatest barrier to their marketing success. What are these hard working marketers to do?
• Media and publishing sector didn’t view content marketing as a barrier as they already have much content to use! What have they missed? 
• Large organizations while usually sitting comfy on the resources side, said they lack strategic vision and flexibility in their marketing efforts, a spot where smaller more flexible organizations excelled, mostly due to their entrepreneurial nature and culture.
• Marketers who have been around a long time and learned strategic perspective over their trial and error marketing style cohorts, value best practices in content development and gathering insights on their target audience.

In the conversations we have with many different organizations, whether size or resources, the ones that ‘get it’ are the ones that take the time to put in the necessary resources and budgets necessary to hit their goals.

What goals? Sales and marketing aligned goals. Without sales and marketing becoming unified and aligned what is the purpose anyways?

Overcoming the sales and marketing barriers

There are a few things that sales and marketing teams whether in a one person shop, 25 person shop, or 500 person org, can do now to help get going on the right track:

1. Talk to each other – No not just another meeting, set revenue goals together and reach them
2. Work together on the target audience profiling – Sales might have one ideal target audience while marketing may have another. Stop that! Get together and put the same target audience together and go with it.
3. Embrace inbound marketing – Inbound marketing is a sales and marketing person’s dream come true. While it does not solve all of the selling and marketing issues, it does give you a fresh new approach to selling and marketing. Learn more by clicking around on some of the top articles on this blog.

A little bonus here, check out the graphic below which MarketingSherpa made earlier this year. It covers the top 5 most effective demand generation tactics which are:

1. Website design, management and optimization (31%)
2. SEO (29%)
3. Email marketing (26%)
4. Content marketing (23%) (watch this one go up this next year)
5. Tradeshows (20%) (last on purpose?)

Jump the Barriers

The good thing (thinking optimistically) about barriers are that they can be overcome.

Sales managers are always seeking better ways to keep the inbound marketing sales funnel full of leads. It is common knowledge that the Internet is used by consumers to research products and services. With this relevant knowledge about consumer behavior, it is considered critical that business management harness the Internet’s substantial ability to generate incoming inquiries and invite customers to ask questions.

Through the use of blogs, social media and websites, companies can attract highly coveted sales leads. By providing relevant and engaging content, a company’s site gains favor with Google and ranks higher on the page. The higher the Google ranking, the greater the likelihood that a customer will click on your site.

Blogs

Blogs offer an attractive marketing option for identifying inbound customers. Since blog content changes frequently, it is ranked higher and considered more relevant than more stagnant websites that are updated less frequently. Not only does Google rank blogs higher than a typical website, a blog offers incoming traffic the ability to share information with others and to comment on content, which also improves a company’s ranking. Interactive sites rank higher with Google.

Google constantly changes the criteria used to rank information, so it is important for marketing managers to stay abreast of these changes for the best results. Smaller companies may decide to turn over this marketing task to a specialist company. Other companies decide to hire marketing staff who specialize in search engine optimization (SEO) techniques and social media.

SEO Content and Ranking

Feeding the inbound marketing sales funnel requires a mastery of SEO strategies. Using mixed media impacts a company’s Google ranking. It is no longer enough to rely completely on keyword selection as was a popular theory until recently. These days, videos and photo images need to be utilized on blogs and websites to garner top rankings.

Another technique for ensuring a higher ranking on Google is to use social media for sharing information on your company blog or website. Social media benefits a company in two important ways. It generates leads directly through the extended audience provided by followers and friends on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, plus it elevates website rankings through SEO.

Content is still king when it comes to driving traffic to your company site. Nothing fills up the inbound marketing sales funnel like relevant content. Anticipating what customers want, and how content will be ranked by Google is a challenge. Posting interesting content is a creative endeavor. One technique used by some companies is to post counter arguments to criticisms already posted on the Internet about the company.

These days it is likely that any highly visible company has some negative feedback on the web. By posting your company’s side of the story, you stand a chance of recovering prospective clients. Blogs and question and answer content are the perfect forum for practicing damage control to tell your side of the story against critics.

Small businesses that provide services can run into “dry-patches” sometimes. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can be an important part of your sales funnel. Local SEO helps to drive traffic to your website. When local inbound marketing is applied efficiently, this traffic can be converted into online sales.

Four Inbound Marketing Strategies

Start a Blog

Blogs are great for local inbound marketing. They help to provide your visitors with informative, valuable content, giving your visitors reasons to come back to your blog for more.

You should link your website to your blog, and vice versa. Providing great content that gives your visitors reasons to trust your company increases the chances that these visitors will also visit your website.

Google and other search engines give higher rankings to sites that continuously change and provide unique, SEO friendly content. As your blog becomes more popular, your blog’s search engine rankings will rise, raising your website’s rankings, as well.

Webinars are seminars conducted online. Because they are directed towards a targeted audience, your viewers are already interested in your product or service. You just need to convince them that you are the company to provide it.

They are helpful with local inbound marketing because they can be used as an online sales commercial, or another way of providing informative content.  They should link to your website and its individual pages, as well as your blog and its individual blog posts.

Provide free eBooks for download from your website. Online visitors like free downloads, especially when they are related to what they are searching for.

Publish paid eBooks that provide extensive informative content, along with links.  Your eBooks should be marketed through all of your online media, including your blog, forums, social networks, etc.

Social Media Marketing is one of the most popular niche inbound marketing tools of today. When it comes to business local inbound marketing, the top three networks are:

• Facebook – Get a Facebook Business Page, not a personal profile page. Facebook Pages are more very efficient because, unlike personal pages, they are optimized by Google and other search engines. When  back-linked to your website through your profile and posts Facebook Pages can help to increase your website’s SEO rankings.
• X (formerly Twitter) – Every business should have a X (formerly Twitter) account. X (formerly Twitter) allows you to find followers and people to follow using keywords related to your industry. Case studies have shown that the more tweets that link to your website, the more that sites’ search engines rankings will increase.
• LinkedIn – LinkedIn is a social network created with businesses and networking in mind. It focuses networking users from similar industries. By completing your profile, you give others a way of finding you using keywords related to your industry.

Produce Webinars

• Webinars are seminars conducted online. Because they are directed towards a targeted audience, your viewers are already interested in your product or service. You just need to convince them that you are the company to provide it.
• They are helpful with local inbound marketing because they can be used as an online sales commercial, or another way of providing informative content.
• They should link to your website and its individual pages, as well as your blog and its individual blog posts.

Publish eBooks

• Provide free eBooks for download from your website. Online visitors like free downloads, especially when they are related to what they are searching for.
• Publish paid eBooks that provide extensive informative content, along with links.
• Your eBooks should be marketed through all of your online media, including your blog, forums, social networks, etc.

Be Active in Social Media Marketing

These four local inbound marketing strategies can be implemented by you and your entire staff. With enough dedication and time, these techniques can help raise your SEO rankings substantially, increasing lead generation efforts, and helping to increase your online sales by closing more deals.

If you have a business, then you know that these days, not having a website is a marketing blunder. More people use the Internet than any other media to find products, services, and companies in their area, and abroad, and if you’re not online, you’re not in the game!

If you haven’t already consulted an inbound marketing agency about developing an online marketing plan, then you’re probably wondering how you can make online marketing work for you.

Here are ten simple tips that can help you to improve your online presence right now:

1. Keep it simple

When it comes to navigation, layout and design, there are a few unwritten rules you don’t want to break. Make your content easy to find, or your visitors might get frustrated, and look elsewhere.

2. Use information marketing

Marketing and advertising guru Seth Godin says that information marketing is the only marketing left, so use information to boost your credibility, keep customers on your site, and create a reputation as an expert.

3. Quality content

Make sure that your content is always high quality. Avoid common mistakes like keyword stuffing, and try to put yourself in your visitor’s shoes – what would you want to read if you visited a site like yours?

4. Blogging

Use a blog to add less formal, yet still valuable content and news about your industry, your products and services, and any other relevant information.

5. Compelling offers

Add downloadable content – create a resource center. Whether it’s a white paper, an eBook, or a tool, adding interesting content to your site can bring in visitors.

6. Encourage collaboration

Consider an interactive platform, like a forum or chat area. Sites that are all text, and all static, are unlikely to bring you repeat visitors!

7. Form and function

Think about form AND function when you design. You want your site to look good but also perform well. Make sure that you check for broken links, pages that don’t load properly, and other problems whenever you update your site.

8. Keep content fresh

Make it a rule to upload new content regularly. Not only will it improve your search engine rankings, but also bring visitors back, to view your new content.

9. Social media integration

Link your social network profiles to your site. Social networks can be a big boost to your marketing, and they can help you to build an online marketing network.

10. Competitive analysis

Look at your competitors’ sites. Look at other great sites out there. What do you love? What do you hate? Borrow the best ideas, and make them your own, and avoid the mistakes!

Marketing Takeaway

An inbound marketing agency can help you to improve your website, but you don’t always need an inbound marketing agency to make a great start. All business owners can have great sites if they focus on giving visitors what they want – information, and an element of interactivity.

Every inbound marketing agency out there will tell you that there’s a big difference between a brochure and a great website. Remember that, and make sure that you use the tools and resources that the online medium offers to build a truly great site. You’ll be glad you did!

As a business owner in today’s rapidly changing world you are faced with a lot more choices of how and where you can generate new customers.

Traditional media advertising such as newspapers, yellow pages, direct mail, TV, and radio can be prohibitively expensive and are less effective in producing the Return on Investment (ROI) that they did just five years ago.

An inbound marketing agency could be the answer you are seeking.

One of my favorite ads from a top telecommunication company states that 40% of small businesses have no visibility because they don’t have a website. I would like to add to that observation that another 40% of small business owners have a website that they don’t use effectively. The site functions as a passive brochure that only offers limited visibility to family, friends, and existing customers.

I will spare you explaining in detail all the buzzwords associated with what a good inbound marketing agency can offer, like search engine optimization, search engine marketing, content marketing, landing pages, lead nurturing, lead conversion and web analytics. Suffice it to say, if you aren’t participating in a program to aggressively drive traffic to your content rich web site you are missing one of the best and most cost-effective ways to reach new prospects.

Many small business owners are under the mistaken impression that because they have a local store front, most potential customers within ten or fifteen miles already know who they are, where they are located and what they offer.  While it is true that if you have been in business for more than a year or two, 20% of your business probably comes from returning customers and another 20% comes from referrals or ”word of mouth”. It is the remaining 60% that an effective inbound marketing agency can drive to your business.

Engaging an experienced inbound marketing agency can help level the playing field for a small business owner with limited time and a limited budget by using that passive web site to drive prospects and converting them to new customers for your business.

Business owners of all kinds who desire to expand their companies through lead generation can do this easily through the integration of sales and marketing efforts. Activities such as social media, blogging and other content marketing with powerful search engine tools can greatly contribute to business growth. Lead generation effectiveness also involves keeping abreast of marketing trends through business leadership specialists.

Lead and Demand Generation

Lead and demand generation activities build business services and product awareness through the use of varied email, social media, viral and pay per click marketing strategies, search engine optimization and affiliate marketing. A marketing plan which combines these methods along with offline advertising can produce the most effective return on investment through new prospect acquisition.

Basic Email Marketing

Email marketing has been a staple of marketing campaigns in the past. While methods for lead generation includes initial customer contact, email is also an effective and non-intrusive strategy for follow-up and providing information through newsletters and other sales materials to inspire lead conversion into actual customers.

Content Marketing

Content marketing includes activities from creating and sharing web content, to providing useful information through forums, blogs and networking events. The purpose behind content marketing is to offer the highest quality and most valuable and relevant information to both current and potential customers to motivate consumer action. The benefits of content marketing which results in reader retention can also improve brand awareness and loyalty.

Marketing Channel Coordination

Combining lead generation efforts such as content, email, and social media strategies is an effective way to increase business awareness and company growth. Engaging in link building activities such as those can help to establish direct demand and interest in any service or product. The most effective marketing plans usually include the overlap of methods to a certain degree, to foster effective lead generation. As such, varied marketing activities are an important component of engaging current and potential customers.

Marketing Takeaway

Businesses today have certain advertising advantages that were previously unavailable to them in the past, with such a wide variety of marketing mediums available. Because of this, businesses are able to successfully participate in lead generation efforts which can greatly maximize their profit potential.