I’m sure you’ve heard of outbound marketing vs. inbound marketing. Outbound is when you target a group of customers and push your message out to them. Inbound marketing is when you get those customers to seek you out and return to your company for information time and time again.
One of the best ways to start with inbound marketing is to create excellent content. What do your customers want? What type of information is valuable to them? You can easily ask them when you meet face-to-face or at trade shows or even have them complete surveys. Surveys are practically cost-free these days. There are several “free” or low-cost companies that will help you develop a 5-question questionnaire that you can email to key customers. A blog is one of the best ways to capture your audience. If you have great content, they’ll come back for more. Be sure to use keywords in your content so that the search engines will notice, add a button to share the content on social media sites and use analytics to track your most popular posts.
Create special landing pages. Don’t just send your readers to your home page. For example, if you want to get people to sign up for your newsletter, create a specialized landing page to direct them to your sign-up form. And be sure your sign-up form is brief. I know we always want to know everything about our potential customers. So, at a minimum, ask for their email address and then if you are B-to-B company, you can ask for their company name, title, and perhaps their website URL. But, that’s about it. Too many blanks to complete and you’ll lose your audience.
Once you have compiled a great list of customers and potential customers, schedule emails to go out regularly. Nurture those leads by analyzing your customer’s interests. Provide white papers, newsletters, and other information that might be of interest to the audience so that you provide them assurance of your expertise. And, don’t forget to manage those leads. Too many companies are great at collecting names and email addresses, but they don’t do anything with them. Segment those leads, keep track of your campaigns, and check your web analytics to find out which emails garnered the most interest.
Finally, close the loop with analytics. Find out what you did right and find out what you did wrong. Marketing is ever changing. You just can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect to be successful. Markets change, people change, and their likes and dislikes change over time. So stay current with your customers needs and wants.
