Welcome to our multiple part series on inbound marketing for small business. In this series we will go over the different parts of inbound marketing and how it fits into your current marketing strategy. This post will be an overview on what you will need to do to get started.
First, what is inbound marketing? In the most basic terms, inbound marketing is the process of creating content that is intentionally crafted to attract your target audience to your website. Let’s work through this backwards to understand exactly what this means.
Your Website
This is the online face of your company. It is the marketing, sales, customer service, and PR departments all in one, and one of the most important pieces of the inbound marketing process. Sometimes it is the first impression your potential customer will have of your company. You need a modern website that will cover all of these things. It doesn’t have to be fancy with all of the expensive bells and whistles, but it needs to work for the type of customers that you are trying to attract.
Target Audience
Speaking of your potential customers, you will need to have a solid grasp on who they are and what they want. Understanding your target market is one of the keys to an effective business and should affect everything you do. You want to create a great experience for your customers from first impression until they tell all of their friends about you and then even longer.
Intentionally Crafted
Everything you do in the inbound marketing process needs to have a purpose. You know your target market and you know what they want, but how are you going to give it to them? The best way to make sure everything is intentionally crafted is to make sure you analyze the results of everything you do. Being able to quantify the results isn’t always easy, but it can make everything you do much more effective. If you believe you created the perfect website for your target market, but you see that the average user leaves just seconds after arriving, then you may need to either rethink the perfection of your website or your understanding of the target market.
Creating Content
So how do you reach all this target audience and bring them to your website? For inbound marketing the answer is creating content. You understand what your customer wants and what their pain points are, you help them achieve it. If you own a landscaping business and your clients keep asking you how to save water, create content about drought resistant plants. If you run a small grocery store and your customers want to know how to save money by cooking for their growing teenagers, create content about low cost recipes that can even fill their endless appetite. The content can be anything from short informative blog posts, such as this one, to in-depth video tutorials.
Conclusion
This has been a very quick overview on inbound marketing for small business. In the next few weeks we will be posting about each part of inbound marketing more in depth and will leave the links to those posts here. I hope this has been helpful in some way and if you have any questions on how any of these things relate to your business in particular, feel free to send us a message or check out our inbound marketing services.
