There is a lot of buzz around inbound marketing these days, leaving many people wonder what that even means. No worries - it’s actually a pretty simple concept.

Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing is traditional broadcasted, interruption-based advertising. It is email blasts, direct mail, TV ads, online banner ads. It is advertising to someone who is not particularly looking to learn about your product or service at the time they receive your message.

Inbound Marketing

So inbound marketing is the opposite of outbound. It is being visible when people are searching for the products or services that you offer. This audience is highly engaged and actually wants to see your advertising!

So, where do people search for information that is relevant to your business? Search engines (Google, Bing), social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) and other websites that aggregate information. Let’s look at these each individually.

Search Engines

You want people to be able to find your business when they are searching for the products or services that you sell, no news there. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is tedious and time-consuming, but critical to getting your website found. There is so much to know about SEO that you must either become an SEO expert or hire one to really make big strides in improving your visibility. 

It’s not just about keywords and meta tags, either. The actual content on your website should be relevant and valuable, and you should have a lot of it! This gets into content creation marketing, which is a whole other blog post, but very closely related. The point is - if you have a story to tell, put it on your website. If you have some tips that could help your potential clients, put it on your site. Don’t wait for your site to be perfect because it never will be. Start generating your content now! (You are welcome to finish reading this first, but when you’re done, get writing!)

Social Media

Most likely, people are already talking about your business. Do you know what they are saying? If not, you are missing out on free feedback about your company. Also, social media is basically online word of mouth and it’s no secret that it’s some powerful stuff. Tell people about all of this wonderful content you are creating and if they see value in it or in your business, they are likely to pass it on to their network.

Third Party Websites/Tools

There are plenty of websites out there that aggregate information about various industries. Find these websites as they are relevant to your industry and make sure you are on them. These types of websites show up very high in search results and therefore generate lots of traffic. Also, having links to your site from these websites will increase your search engine rankings. It gives the search engines more information on what your site is about.

How often do you do a google maps search to find out where the nearest dry cleaner, salon or Thai restaurant is? Personally, I do this kind of location-based search all the time. If your business isn’t listed on sites like these, people won’t even know you exist and they will find your nearby competitors instead.

Tools like Yelp, FourSquare and Google Places probably already have some information on your business. If you haven’t claimed yourself as the business owner, the information is probably incomplete (such as business hours, products offered, etc.). Check these sites out and make sure that any information that is posted about your company is complete and accurate. If no information is posted, that’s an easy problem to fix!

So, I encourage you to tap into these tools with the hope that your potential clients will have an easier time finding you and will generate more business. A word of caution though, good marketing can be a major catalyst for good businesses, but a force of destruction for bad businesses. Nothing destroys a bad business faster than good marketing, and no marketing has ever moved faster than social media.

Thanks for reading! You can get started writing your content now. :) Good luck!