Importance of Inbound Marketing for Small Business

Inbound marketing plays an important role in the web-based business. It is inbound marketing strategies only which helps you to attract visitors toward your website and turn them into sales.

There are three basic strategies of inbound marketing and they are; get found, convert, and analyze. And, this article concentrates on these three strategies of inbound marketing to tell you, ‘how important inbound marketing is for small business?’ Let us start with the Get Found.

Get Found

This strategy helps you attract genuine web visitors, as they are the only one who acts like the strong foundation and without them you are nothing on internet platform. Visitors make a website successful, and if you don’t have them then you’ll not get anything, in general, you can build your business online without web visitors.

In this strategy, content plays a crucial role and the foremost step to start with is Blogging. In various researches it has been found that companies that are into blogging generate 55% more leads than those who do not. The blog gives you a platform to publish genuine and authentic content on a regular basis, which eventually attracts the web users.

The second step in this strategy is SEO (search engine optimization), as it is a general phenomenon to ‘search before you buy,’ and when it comes to purchasing anything be it services or any product online, people often search about them on search engines such as Google.

SEO helps a website to get listed on search engines by using proper keywords and key phrases which are based on your business, and then optimizing the web pages by using them along with some quality content and building backlinks for the website.

The last but not the least step in this strategy is Social Media, as in today’s time people go online to interact with their family and friends by asking or answering questions, sharing content they like, and debating on varied topics. And, as a marketer, you must take your content as something which can attract readers and become the point of discussion. The more people will discuss it, the more you’ll gain from it.

Convert

In this strategy, the main aim should be the conversion of the web visitors gained via Blogging, SEO and Social Media into the paying customers. This strategy generally involves three basic steps where you must concentrate on, and they are; calls to action, landing pages and email marketing.

1. Calls to action: Calls to action are generally links or buttons that encourage the visitor to take a certain action.
2. Landing pages: Send your website visitors on pages where you have mentioned about your offers and rewards by linking them with a call to action links or buttons.
3. Email Marketing: There are times when people engage with your content, products and services but don’t have any interest in becoming a paid consumer that is where email marketing is effective. Send regular email newsletters to your readers or consumers as it will help you to build trust and nurture a long term relationship, which might make them think about buying your products and services.

Analyze

It is the most critical part of the inbound marketing strategy. Once visitors start coming on your website via Blogging, SEO and Social, you need to analyze their overall behavior like engagement with your web page content, overall time spent on the website, leads, and conversion rate.

You have now understood how inbound marketing helps you to reach more and more people. And at the same time, it also entails the following benefits for your business:

Cost-Effectiveness

You have the advantage of generating leads for your business at a lesser cost with inbound marketing as compared with the other marketing forms. As small businesses are constrained by small financial budgets, inbound marketing is an ideal way to make use of every penny earmarked for marketing.

Long-Lasting Effect

Since the fundamental premise of inbound marketing is building relationships with consumers, so you have the privilege of building long term relationships with them if you can gain their trust.

You can reach them every time you post content on social media and your relationship with them remains intact. With a strong relationship, you can easily sell your products and services to them.

Stretch to New Markets and Audiences

As inbound marketing is executed online, it allows you with the advantage of run different types of marketing campaigns to reach various types of audiences and new markets. You can post more targeted as well as more relevant content to engage consumers of various segments for drawing their interests to your products and services.

Building Brand Awareness

Generating awareness about your brand among the consumers is a major goal of all businesses, regardless of the size. Inbound marketing is a good way to build awareness about your products and services and your brand name without incurring heavy costs.

It helps in spreading the word about your brand, and that enables you to generate more and more leads for converting into customers.