Increasing your sales through inbound marketing is not only great for the bottom line of your business but in the long run, inbound marketing allows you to constantly increase your base of qualified leads and traffic to your website.
The first step though is to get to know your ideal customer; we talked about this in Increasing Your Sales with Inbound Marketing. The gist of it is that to create and utilise any of the strategies below you need to know your ideal customers. Do you research into what their questions and pain points are. This will help you to focus your inbound marketing around the areas that will achieve the best results. Research will help to inform the backbone of your inbound marketing strategy, great content.
The following three inbound marketing strategies that your local business should be utilising.
Inbound Marketing Strategy 1: Email Marketing
As you are driving traffic to your website through quality content to generate leads and increase sales, you should think of capturing email information for the use of an email marketing list.
Capturing a customer’s email information qualifies them as a quality lead because they have actively shown an interest in your business’ information and said, “Hey, I want more information from you”.
To really build a robust email list, it’s recommended to have quality content to send your customers rather than spamming them with products. Not only will you get a low open rate, but the conversions will be next to nothing.
A great list gives your local business the chance to draw in more visitors to your site, with a higher chance of converting them into a sale. It’s the perfect way to boost sales when you need them most because it’s delivered to your customers directly in their inbox.
Inbound Marketing Strategy 2: Social Media Marketing
Your customers are on social media so why aren’t you? Social media marketing should be seen as a long-term marketing strategy, but it’s something every local business should seriously consider. It’s another opportunity for customers to find your business online.
You social media strategy should start with the basics. To put it bluntly, it’s more than likely that customers aren’t searching for your business. There searching for a solution to a problem. A problem that you need to help them solve, but how do you get your business in front of them?
With social media, it’s all about who you know. Find the key people who are influencing people within your industry. This could be another business or a social group. Reach out to these key people and see how you can associate your business with them. Their audiences will be interested in the products or services you offer.
Show you are on social media for more than promoting your own products and services. Share and talk about other people content. They might, in turn, share your content with their audience.
Inbound Marketing Strategy 3: Building Your Brand as an Authority
Building your business’ authority helps to potential customers to recognise and think your company first. Being a known brand can greatly influence how potential customer will interact with you. They will be much more willing to reach out to you or purchase your products as they will trust what your company does.
Not only that but when you are seen as a known authority within a certain industry via your content search engine will take this into account when ranking your company website over other sites. You provide value. Value that your customers need and search engines will look more favourably upon you for that.
Investing in building your brand, both online and offline, greatly increasing your online driven customers and gains you some advantage to those other local businesses that you could be fighting against for traffic online.