Growth Hack Alert...It's Time To Change Your Small Business Marketing Strategy with Inbound Marketing

Chances are you’re not a fan of being marketed to, right? What’s the point of interrupting people to try and push a product or service on them with your small business marketing approach?

You wouldn’t wish it on yourself, so why do it to others?

It’s these questions that laid the foundation for inbound marketing. It quickly became an approach that made attracting visitors with search-friendly, quality content a priority, along with converting those visitors with relevant and tailored communication.

Inbound marketing is all about getting found online by your target audience. It is about where people are looking for you.

Today’s consumers have dramatically changed their shopping behavior and businesses need to adapt quickly. Inbound concentrated on attracting the right type of leads to your business and then converting them into satisfied customers and, just as importantly, brand loyalists.

Simply put, it’s a more human way to market.

So where is inbound marketing going this year? Let’s take a look at the trends we think are going to make things better for marketers and customers alike.

Ads Done the Inbound Way

Are you a bit skeptical when it comes to placing ads in your small business marketing strategy?

It’s been found that many businesses are starting to use paid media in their inbound marketing endeavors with much success. So it may be time to rethink your stance on this one.

Can advertising be sort of inbound, though? What about those ads that solve a search query? Or those that amplify relevant content?

Here’s the thing: content matters – not the path to it or its format. When ads are composed of great content or lead people to great content, they tend to contribute to a very accomplished inbound marketing tactic.

Web Platforms Made For Marketing

Your website should be one of your top small business marketing platforms. Your prospective customers probably spend more time there, so it plays a big role in the decision process.

The thing with a lot of content management systems, though, is they tend to focus too much on management and not enough on the marketing. That’s why more and more marketers are using specific website platforms designed for content optimization.

Predicative Lead Scoring

Ever heard of Lead scoring? It can actually be a good way for you to align your small business marketing with your sales team around a shared set of criteria. It’s also incredibly time consuming to get going and entails users attempting to find patterns among tons and tons of probable aspects.

Predictive Lead Scoring has taken the guesswork out of this. It combs through a company’s entire history of both unengaged and engaged contacts to find factors indicating a higher close rate. It then uses this information to create a model that will automatically score each contact based on their tendency to close.

Report Add-Ons

Even small business marketing managers have complained about spending too much time reporting on the numbers instead of actually making the numbers. As your business grows, the need to report on progress from a range of angles is going to grow.

Reporting Add-ons can help scale the business. You can pull the most commonly used reports across your sales and marketing efforts or build a custom report for data.

This kind of functionality saves you a lot of time that can be spent elsewhere – like building your business.

Unified Record Systems

If you are outsourcing your marketing efforts, it’s a good idea to look for a consultancy that offers an all-in-one solution for your business.

They may have everything you need to run your sales and marketing strategies, but what about something more? Sure, that may well enough if your customers only interact with your company through traditional sales and marketing channels.

However, the reality is that customers are engaging with businesses through a range of different touch-points from customer support to marketing, sales, billing, website, social media and more.

In order to connect the dots between the different interactions, look for unified systems that will marry your business around a common view of your customers.

Converting Visitors into Contacts

Not all small business marketing endeavors have the budget for marketing software.

That’s why cost-effective apps, such as Hubspots’ Leadin have been developed to work with any website to convert your visitors into contacts.

The app automatically finds publicly available information about the contacts and then tracks the pages that they view so you can market to them more relevantly.

Inbound is for Everyone

Inbound marketing can better position your company to be the solution your target audience is looking for by developing a strong online presence that really reaches out to them and their unique needs and interests.

It doesn’t matter if you’re an experienced marketer or just starting out, a sophisticated team or a solo entrepreneur, Rosy Marketing is making it easier for you to go inbound.

If you’d like more details or want to discuss your small business marketing strategy, please book your free consult today.