Every business needs to engage in one kind of marketing or the other. However, the real question is, what kind of marketing is the most efficient?
If you own a local business, it's pretty vital to engage in marketing activities to attract more and more clients. However, many local businesses often make the mistake of assuming that they only need online marketing if they have a business beyond their local community. Though, with marketing capabilities these days, it has become easier than ever to reach target customers in your local area and beyond.
However, most conventional marketing strategies may perhaps be too expensive or unwieldy for smaller businesses and startups to employ successfully. This is why inbound marketing techniques make more sense, especially for smaller businesses and startups.
If you are reading this blog, then you already know how powerful inbound marketing is. We don't have to tell you how powerful inbound marketing is and how it will change marketers' perspective forever. The statistics speak for themselves.
But how can you benefit from inbound marketing strategies as a local business? Which are the most effective strategies, and are they applicable to your business needs? Can small to medium-sized enterprises exploit the full potential of these strategies?
It is paramount that you know the answers to these questions before investing in inbound marketing.
So, in this blog, we will briefly discuss the ideology of Inbound marketing and then jump into the six highly effective inbound marketing strategies that will help you boost your growth as a local business.
Inbound marketing and its ideology
Inbound marketing ideology is to grow meaningful and long-lasting relationships with customers and prospects by providing them with material that can help them so that they are willingly associated with the brand.
The flywheel of inbound methodology stands on three principals: Attract. Engage, and Delight.
The bottom line is, offer your customers value and give them a reason to choose you and keep choosing you.
Inbound Strategies that will help local businesses Grow
Local businesses can benefit a great deal from inbound marketing. The following are the strategies that will help you yield the desired results:
Distribute free guides related to your business
Free guides are valuable sources of information for your audience. Up to 86% of consumers say that authenticity is a critical factor while deciding what brands they like or support. On the other hand, they claim that less than half of the brands create content that resonates as authentic.
Don't make this mistake. Free guides relevant to your brand or company are a simple but effective way to deliver authentic content that helps your consumers learn and gain knowledge. HubSpot, for example, is the best publisher of free resources and guides. How to create accurate and value-added content that can help your brand?
Here is how:
Go for SEO optimization
Inbound marketing blogs that are SEO optimized generate great results when executed right. You have to take a few keywords and optimize them as much as possible to attract more organic traffic to your website.
You may be astonished to learn that search engines drive 300% more traffic to websites than social media.
With the statistics claiming that 87% of smartphone users use search engines at least once per day, you have to work on your search ranking. To do that, you have to use relevant keywords that are more likely to be entered by your audiences on social media.
We are sharing a three tips to help you with the search engine optimization process:
Build your personal brand
If you want to see more traffic on your website, generation of leads, and conversion of prospects, you have to focus on building your personal brand first. We recommend all the marketers reading this blog to create an individual identity for their brand leaders.
Today's marketing culture is highly dominated by individuals and personalities who can advertise themselves as leaders or subject matter experts. Several entrepreneurs have built their businesses by creating their brand.
Some examples are Hiten Shah, Joel Gascoigne, and Jayson DeMers.
It is undeniable that you are integrally connected to your business. It only makes sense that you leverage your own identity and brand to establish authority in the market and then pass it on to the business.
You can either build your business based on your personal brand or build your business and then use your personal brand for advertising it.
Interact on social media
With 3.5 billion social media users spending an average of 3 hours per day on social media, it has become a golden platform for marketers to promote their brand. Video contents, infographics, illustrations work best on social media. It is an effective way to drive traffic towards your website.
While promoting your content on social media, remember that it's an interactive peer-to-peer platform, involving conversations among friends, families, connections, etc. Thus, to get the best results, you have to offer the users something they can engage with.
Give them a chance to interact with you. Actively participate in asking and answering questions. However, they do not solely rely on social media as a form of marketing. Here are some pro tips that should help you:
Utilize email marketing
Therefore, email marketing is a must when it comes to inbound marketing. But how can you effectively leverage the power of email?
The first step is to make an email list. When it comes to building a business, it is one of the single most important factors. You can even use the email list to create compelling subject-lines that have proven to improve click-through rates.
Hot Tip:- You can build an email list by using a pop-up opt-in form or inviting your web page visitors to subscribe to your newsletter.
Use guest blogging
Like we already mentioned, inbound marketing is almost synonymous with SEO. Guest blogging is another way to achieve great search results, making it one of the most useful inbound marketing tactics. The following are the benefits of Guest blogging:
Additionally, you can add the list of publishing brands on your website's landing page. This will create a sense of prestige for your website. If you are mentioned on a famous or an authoritative website such as Forbes, Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, your visitors' reliability will instantly increase.
Hence, it would help if you considered guest blogging while strategizing your inbound marketing plan.
What to expect?
Inbound marketing is entirely about drawing the customer in. The result of your strategy depends on its execution. How much value are you offering? Can you identify the pain points and interests of your target audience? Are you responding to their demands and queries?
You ought to ask yourself these questions while devising your strategy. You can also hire an inbound marketing consultant or leverage inbound marketing tools to ensure better results. However, there is one mandatory thing to do, and that is to take care of your audience.
And remember, nailing down these inbound marketing strategies can help target the local community and, therefore, must be a top priority for your local business.
