Inbound Marketing is a new way of marketing that many forward-thinking companies are adopting. It uses online methods to grow business. The Internet and technology have created a fundamental shift in the way we and our customers connect with and consume information for purchase decisions. Control is now in the hands of the buyer – not the seller.

Inbound Marketing offers a more effective alternative to traditional Outbound Marketing. Instead of pushing out commercial messages to our audiences -- interrupting our way into their lives – we pull them to us using as a magnet the useful information they’re already looking for online.

Why should you consider Inbound Marketing for your company? How are expensive TV, radio, newspaper and magazine ads, direct mail, coupon mailers, yellow pages and telemarketing doing for your business these days? Probably not so well given Google, Kindle, TiVo/DVR, XM/Sirius Radio, Groupon and voicemail.

Since the way people shop has changed, we have to change the way we market our businesses if we’re to remain competitive and grow. The sooner the better! Inbound Marketing is where marketing is going. And small businesses can use it to level the playing field with – and even leapfrog -- larger competitors.

How Does It Work?

Inbound Marketing is a strategic, measurable and rational process for pulling customers to us online. It has three major parts:

·         Get Found – Help your audiences find you on the Internet (via your website and overall online presence)

·         Convert – Go beyond just ‘driving traffic’ and help your website visitors engage with your company so that they become leads and, eventually, customers

·         Analyze – Measure what’s working best in your online marketing to make your efforts more effective, efficient and accountable to the top and bottom lines.

Get Found

Inbound Marketing starts with an effective website that serves as a dynamic hub – not an online brochure. If you haven’t updated your site in two to three years, it’s time to take a look. What makes a site dynamic is constantly creating and publishing ‘remarkable content’ – content that people will remark about and share. Get Found activities include:

·         Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Include words and terms in your web content that people are actually using to search for you.

·         Blogging – The number one traffic builder – plus, engage with readers through subscriptions, RSS feeds and comments.

·         Social Media – What you’re already doing if your business is on Facebook, Twitter and/or LinkedIn, but making it a more productive part of the picture.

Convert

Once your remarkable content is getting you found, traffic to your website will surge! What next? Attracting people to your website is only the first step. Now you can convert them from visitors to leads and then nurture them through the buying process so that they become customers.

The best way to Convert is to offer more useful information and to help visitors convert themselves. Tools include:

·         More Content – Fact Sheets, Whitepapers, Videos, Webinars

·         Call to Action Buttons (CTA’s) -- Tell people what you’d like them to do, i.e. ‘Click Here to Download’

·         Conversion Forms – Get contact info in exchange for your useful information

·         Landing Pages – Specific pages on your site where people arrive in response to an online offer, where it’s easy to see what to do next.

·         Email – Used in Inbound Marketing to engage and nurture relationships with people who have given their email addresses.    

Analyze

As small business owners, our most precious commodities are our time and treasure. Fortunately, there are tools that can analyze/measure our online results as never before. We can see exactly how people are searching for us, where they’re coming from, which web pages, landing pages and content are most popular – and much more.

The more we know, the better decisions we can make about deploying our marketing resources. From a growing array of measurement tools, here are a few of the best known:

·         Google Analytics – Robust free Website analysis tools – a minimal requirement for online marketing.

·         HubSpot – Subscription-based all-in-one Inbound Marketing automation including integrated analysis of all steps. (Disclosure: E.R. Becker Company is a HubSpot user and value added reseller)

·         Adobe Business Catalyst – Web-developer tools that incorporate many aspects of Inbound Marketing, plus ecommerce and analytics.

Make the shift to Inbound Marketing and get ahead of the marketing curve!