A new form of Internet marketing is becoming more and more popular for small businesses, and it’s called inbound marketing. I didn’t make this up. Hubspot, the makers of Website Grader, are big advocates of inbound marketing. For small businesses, it’s a powerful form of marketing because you can reach specific audiences without having to spend large amounts of money. Basically, inbound marketing consists of three components:
- Your company’s website – describes your product/service and the value you deliver
- A search engine optimization strategy – your plan to attract leads to your website using content and inbound links that increase your site’s visibility online
- A social media strategy – the process by which you are distributing your message through your online relationships
It used to be good enough to just have a website to attract prospects, and it definitely helps to have links from other sites to your own site. Today, these two activities are not enough to effectively market your small business online.
The Missing Link
Social media is the missing link from online marketing that enables it to work more like a network of referrals. It’s what takes Internet marketing and turns it into inbound marketing because of the way your message can be distributed by leveraging your many relationships to perform your marketing for you.
Once you have your website up and visible in the search engines, you can announce to the world through Facebook and Twitter that your business exists. With a compelling message, your story can be easily relayed through your friends and followers to their friends and followers to their friends and followers and so on.
As long as you have an interesting story, inbound marketing is a very effective way of getting the word out about your small business to a large audience that used to require significant expense when using traditional outbound marketing strategies like trade shows, TV advertising, and Yellow Pages advertising. There’s really no reason to do these anymore, if you really need to get the most bang for your buck.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Guy Kawasaki, founder of Alltop and the master of evangelizing businesses:
If you have more Money than brains, you should focus on Outbound Marketing.
If you have more Brains than money, you should focus on Inbound Marketing.
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