An easy way to think of inbound marketing is simply as the practice of getting your customers to come to you. While a fully integrated marketing strategy should have a plan for both inbound and outbound channels, there are many advantages that inbound marketing can offer. This is particularly true for smaller businesses that typically have a more limited marketing budget than larger organizations.
Leads generated from inbound marketing efforts can often be more interested in your products and services and have a better conversion rate than outbound methods like cold calling and advertising. For small businesses, this means less time and resources need to be invested in the conversion phase by your sales and customer service staff. If you’re an owner and operator who primarily handles these aspects yourself, this can be particularly valuable.
As effective as inbound marketing can be, you need to have the right strategy and tactics in place to make sure you are achieving your lead generation and sales goals while staying within your budget. To help you better understand how inbound digital marketing can work for you, we’re sharing the following guide.
How to make inbound marketing work for your business
Since inbound marketing is all about attracting leads to your business, you need to have a presence on multiple online platforms that are all working to funnel leads to you. The good news for small businesses is that these platforms are often cost effective and they can effectively generate inbound leads.
Inbound marketing channels for your small business can include:
- Search engine optimization — Also known as SEO, this is the practice of optimizing your business’s website to rank high on the organic, or unpaid, results of the search engines. This can drive relevant traffic to a landing page that is custom-designed for lead conversion.
- Social media — Building an audience and having an active presence on social media can create awareness of your brand and business. An integrated social media plan should be both useful and helpful to your audience while simultaneously being optimized to drive leads through organic linking and advertising.
- Blogs — Regularly updating your company blog with useful and informative content is a great opportunity to build interest in your small business. This platform should present a wide variety of content and be an opportunity to hear from different experts in your organization.
Other inbound marketing efforts can include white papers and online videos. While inbound marketing methods in the digital sphere can be highly cost effective, doing it right still requires marketing expertise.
Work with the digital marketing experts at Burg & Co.
If you want to take your small business’s inbound marketing to the next level, trust the digital storytelling experts at Burg & Co. We have the decades of combined experience needed to build a strategy that is right for your organization and your audience. Attracting leads through inbound marketing requires high-quality, evergreen content that is genuinely helpful to your audience.
We’ll work with you to understand your goals and your target audience and create a customized digital marketing plan for your budget that includes SEO, social media and content marketing. To learn more, contact us today.
