Practical Inbound Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses
Many small businesses have realized the effectiveness of inbound marketing in reaching targeted audiences with measurable results. Spending some time and money on building an inbound marketing plan can be the difference between a good year and a great year for your business.
Inbound marketing process is based on:
- Attracting your ideal client by providing relevant, optimized content and distributing it across different online channels.
- Converting visitors into qualified leads by offering premium content that encourages them to sign up to receive.
- Nurturing these leads by providing the right information at the right time, shortening the sales process and turning these leads into customers.
- Delighting your customers with a continuous stream of valuable content to turn them into referral sources.
Benefits of Inbound Marketing
Turn the World into Your Marketplace
There are many benefits of inbound marketing, especially for small businesses:
- You can reach prospects, 24 hours a day, every day. There is no other marketing activity that has extensive reach at minimal costs. Whether your world is global or local, inbound marketing can put your business in front of your customers when they are searching.
- You get an incredible amount of visibility that far exceeds your business size or geographic location, enabling you to reach more potential clients. Planned and executed correctly, your online marketing efforts can return a much greater return within a reasonable budget.
- A professionally developed website and quality content can position your business as an expert resource in your industry, making it easy and convenient for prospects learn about what you do, how you do it, and the knowledge you possess.
- Generating leads through inbound marketing enables you to build a larger, more qualified prospect list that you can nurture through marketing activities such as an online newsletter.
Before you can reap the benefits of inbound marketing, you need a plan. Putting structure around your strategy helps you remain focused on the goal.
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Your Inbound Marketing Plan
Define your Inbound Marketing Strategy
Before you can dive into inbound marketing strategies, you must understand your target audience, define your inbound marketing goals and then choose the strategies to achieve your goals. In addition, your inbound marketing strategy needs a solid web presence to support your inbound marketing activities.
Inbound marketing strategies include:
- Search – Optimizing your website's content based on how people search for your products and services in order to receive organic placements in the search engine results is critical to your inbound marketing strategy. Depending on the competitiveness of your keywords, you may need to engage in some paid search (or PPC) strategies to ensure you are visible in the search engine results.
- Content marketing – Content is critical to inbound marketing because it is what attracts your visitors to your web presence. Develop a content strategy that includes blog posts, e-books, videos, presentations, case studies and other types of content to educate, inspire and entertain your audience.
- Social media – Creating great content is a start but without traffic, it won't help your cause. Reach your target audience by sharing and promoting your content on the social media platforms that are most relevant to them. Content promotion is crucial to your inbound marketing strategy because it helps people discover your content more easily.
Inbound Marketing Services
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Have Questions?
Inbound marketing takes resources to be successful but it can be done, even by an one person business. The key is to create a practical plan that you can handle or get some resources to help.
If you are unsure whether inbound marketing will work for your business, fill out the form to the right and let's set up a brief call. I'll be happy to answer your questions.
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