You've worked hard on your brick and mortar business for many years and feel you offer consumers something they need.
But how do you bridge the gap between those potential consumers and your high-quality content, services, and/or merchandise? Inbound Marketing utilizes an understanding of how consumers actually use the Internet to seek information and make purchases, and then applies this understanding to every element of advertising content and marketing design.
Whether you have an established online presence or are just in the conceptual stages of your first website's development, taking advantage of the Internet's vast marketing resources can be a daunting task worthy of serious consideration, and, in many instances, help from a professional inbound marketing consultant.
Even the web savvy can benefit from professional assistance.
An inbound marketing professional will offer the advice and expertise you may need to establish your Internet presence and build consistent traffic your business.
How Does it Work? There are several ways to attract potential clients, patients, or customers: 1.
Search Engine Optimization - SEO, as it's called, is the method of organizing your web content to make it easier for search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing to read and rank your content and your website.
Search engines use "crawlers" (some people call them spiders, others refer to them as bots) and other specialized software to judge your content and place it on their search engine result pages (SERPs).
Through the use of keywords and metadata, a previously obscure page can improve its ranking and raise a businesses online visibility.
This is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to build a presence on the web.
2.
Social Media Marketing - Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have members in the hundreds of millions.
Not only does social media reach more people than any other medium, users of social media organize themselves into marketable niches, Tribes or congregations.
An effective social media marketing strategy and a well crafted message will reach people via the various social media memberships in ways an outbound marketing strategy, including the best efforts of a top-flight advertising agency, ever could.
An understanding of how people interact on these sites can help you take advantage of the biggest, and steadily growing lead generation system in the world.
3.
Blogging - Building relationships with clients and customers has always been one of the biggest challenges for marketers trying to build trust in a brand.
Now, full featured blogs provide opportunities for businesses to interactive with their customers on a ongoing basis, creating previously unimaginable channels for user-feedback and long term business relationships.
Relationship marketing has become the new catch-phrase and those who understand and build relationships with their existing client base, and with prospective clients, will be in business long after the competition has folded up their tents and gone home.
4.
Pay-Per-Click or PPC - This method provides traffic and leads the old-fashioned way, by paying for it.
The various search engines will allow you to generate text ads and banners, charging you only when someone clicks on your link.
Cost is established by the search engines based on competition for various keywords and by what they think of your architecture.
In other words, how your campaign is set up and how it is converting.
The effectiveness of your click through rate will determine how much or how little you pay per click.
This method can be quite expensive, particularly if you are a novice and lack the know-how to manage your campaign.
It is easy for the cost of a PPC campaign to get away from even a savvy marketing consultant, so caution should be exercised and daily budgets should be kept low until you get a feel for what you are doing.
Only by balancing all of the aspects of a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy, including the elements listed above, will you improve your offline business' advertising effectiveness and generate meaningful traffic online, build new relationships or improve ongoing ones, and establish a lasting Internet image for your business.
If you are unsure at all, don't leave your business' future to chance, get an in depth inbound marketing assessment from a knowledgeable consultant and watch your traffic, and your business, grow!