Inbound marketing is growing in popularity among small businesses for the simple fact that it works. Like for like, every pound invested in an inbound marketing strategy is likely to deliver more than the equivalent invested in outbound sales, advertising, or direct marketing. Let’s take a look at the main reasons why inbound marketing works for small businesses.
1) Creates an organic relationship with your customers
Inbound marketing gives your prospects control over when to contact you, and under what terms. Every time the prospect progresses the relationship by engaging with your content, the move comes from them, with each action ‘triggering’ a response from you. It is this organic customer-driven communication exchange that creates strong and profitable relationships from inbound marketing. Inbound marketing doesn’t impose on your customers in any way, and it isn’t pushy. If someone finds your content valuable, they will look to find out more – it’s that simple.
2) Increases brand awareness and trust
By engaging in inbound marketing, you create a web of online content that increases brand recognition and your business’s visibility on search engines and on social media. This gives you a level of recognition equal to or exceeding the largest businesses in your industry, especially if they depend primarily on outbound marketing and sales. And the more high value content you publish, the more you come to be seen as an authority in your sector, and a trusted provider of products and services. This increases brand awareness and trust far more cheaply and effectively than many traditional advertising channels.
3) Creates evergreen online content
One of the most gratifying things about inbound marketing is when a client tells us that they still receive new leads from a blog post or e-book we wrote for them two, four, five years ago. This is because online content is evergreen – once you publish a guide, landing page, blog, or social media post online, it stays there forever, continuing your online presence and reaching new audiences all the time. Each individual blog article is counted as a separate page of your website by Google, increasing your domain authority and your search weight for important keywords. Content marketing is, quite simply, a gift that keeps giving for your brand, with new content building on and expanding your value proposition to potential customers. Of course, this truth makes it essential that you only publish content of the highest quality and relevance to your target buyers, and that all content is optimised for the right audiences and keywords.
4) Creates sales-qualified leads
For many business owners, the most nerve-wracking thing about outbound sales is building trust and rapport from the ground up with someone who knows little or nothing about their business, products, or services. This rarely happens on the first meeting, and so even when things go well, the outbound sales cycle can be lengthy. With inbound marketing, the experience is different for both salesperson and customer. By the time you enter a conversation about sales, the prospect has already been nurtured through online content so that they know about your business, know how the product works, and know the value it could provide them. This takes away a lot of the pressure of sales situations and also shortens your sales cycle by producing more sales qualified leads, who can be converted into paying customers in less time and at lower cost.
5) Promotes customer retention
Business relationships that begin with an open exchange of information and customer-driven engagement have a better chance of long-term profitability. The same inbound marketing tactics that small businesses use to gain new sales can also be deployed to sustain a relationship with existing customers, encouraging loyalty, and increasing opportunities for upselling and cross selling.
Find out more
Inbound marketing provides the key that small businesses need to unlock more online leads, more sales, more conversions, and higher revenues. At JDR, we use a range of inbound marketing strategies to help our customers achieve and exceed their business goals and maximise the value of their marketing budget. To find out more about our services, please call 01332 215152 today.
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