I hate selling.
On the other hand, there’s little I enjoy more than helping others succeed. In fact, that’s why I was a high school teacher many years ago—and the teaching bug is still with me. I started a marketing and advertising agency because I decided almost a decade ago that owning my own firm would be the best way to spend my workdays: helping others succeed and giving me the opportunity to use my creative talents at the same time. Since then, my firm has helped more than 100 clients succeed through campaigns and strategies too numerous to list here. That’s pretty cool if I do say so myself.
To run a small business you need to be a coach, a teacher, a listener, a pseudo IT professional, an account executive, and, yes, a salesperson. I’ll be honest: I don’t like that last one—never have. I enjoy meeting new people, but I dislike cold calling and get bored at networking events where people won’t spend more than eight seconds with you if they think they can’t sell you their wares.
Put me in a room or on the phone with people who know they need one or more of our services, and that’s where I do my best work. I don’t need to “sell” to them; I just need to help them succeed. That’s how I like it.
I’m happy to say that we don’t cold call much anymore. We do just fine with letting people that need us find us using inbound marketing. Don’t get me wrong: it takes work. In fact, it takes dedication, a budget of time and dollars, and a large dose of patience. But it works; and I no longer need to regularly pick up the phone to bother someone I don’t know, who may or may not need what we sell.
Here are some tips for ramping up your inbound marketing and content marketing efforts so your customers will find you.
Good Content + Smart Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is the single most important equation for small and medium businesses today. If your website is too light on content or isn’t optimized well to help search engines understand what your website is all about, you’re missing out on attracting visitors who are probably close to making a buying decision and looking for a business that can help them.
Your website needs to be well written so it clearly communicates your services and capabilities; but, even more importantly, should be written so visitors can understand how you can help them solve their specific business problems. Then you need to write good page titles and descriptions for each page of your site—search engines use this data to determine what your pages are all about.
Your Website Must be Coded Well
If your website isn’t getting the traffic you expect, you might be thinking that you need a website redesign. That might be the case, but it actually may only need to be optimized to better attract your potential buyers. A website needs to be coded well so the search engines can index it effectively. Your web designer or development firm needs to understand search marketing and search engine optimization in order to help you here. If they don’t, you need to either find a new partner or hire a consultant to work along with your designer or developer.
Blog About It
One of the best ways to create regular content on your website is to start a blog. You can keep your current customers updated about what’s been going on within your company; provide commentary on current events as they pertain to your products or services; or simply provide free, helpful information and tips to your customers. The best blogs are those with regular posts that encourage people to participate in conversations. If you start a blog, be transparent and honest and don’t overtly promote your services. Position yourself as a resource of good advice or an expert with important things to say. You can even invite other experts to “guest blog” on your blog to add different perspectives.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaigns
Pay-per-click (also known as paid placement) campaigns with Google, Yahoo!®/Bing®, and other search or social networks are a good complement to traditional SEO strategies that target organic search traffic. You need to write good ads, have good content on your website, and set realistic budgets for these to work well—and, if they are done right, you can boost online exposure very quickly, especially in competitive markets.
Leverage Social Media
Twitter®, Facebook®, LinkedIn®, Pinterest, Groupon™, Google+™, Foursquare® and other social media sites can be great tools for businesses. You do, however, need to evaluate how you can use one or more of them to participate socially with potential customers. The object here is to participate by offering helpful information to people in your network and sharing content that your followers will find interesting—content that will likely be shared with their friends and followers. Good social media marketing is like good PR. You need to identify the networks where your customers and potential clients participate, put together a media plan so you have some content ready when you don’t have anything else to say, and make sure you have the right people on your team managing your social media properties and online reputation. Just because one of your team members is good with technology and uses social media sites for personal use doesn’t mean he or she should be the voice of your company in the social mediasphere.
Don’t Forget the Free Stuff
You don’t need to lay all your cards on the table, but you’ll instill trust and establish credibility if you provide potential customers with good information or advice for free. This can be as simple as posting good, relevant tips on your blog or giving advice on social networking sites. You can also develop white papers or ebooks about specific topics that your customers will find useful and offer them on your website for download.
Traditionalists rejoice: billboards, direct mail, and other classic outbound marketing tools still have a place in a complete marketing or advertising plan. But for most of the businesses we help every day, inbound marketing tactics that drive customers who are already looking for a specific service or product right to their doors (or websites) provide a higher return on investment than pushing a message out to a wide audience with the hope that it resonates with a few potential customers.
Do you have any additional inbound marketing tips or experiences to share? Tell us about them by commentating on this post.
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