Pirela Creative Solutions

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Inbound marketing involves getting found by your potential customers through search and how can we make Inbound Marketing Practices the Key Ingredient to Success? With Inbound Marketing through the Web you need to create a useful, informative website for your industry that attracts visitors naturally through search engines, social media, blogosphere, forums, and let visitors find you and come to you. These inbound methods pre-qualify the leads, so your company message is a friendly and familiar welcoming to the ears rather than casual outbound marketing contacts. By bringing these leads into you, you will enormously save money and time instead of the old outbound strategies. A frequent misconception about Inbound Marketing is that it’s a puzzling technique that can only be done by the search marketing masters. Nothing could be further from the truth. Inbound marketing is something that, with the right system in place, you can do yourself.

One of the key ingredients of successful Inbound Marketing strategy is creating relevant content that will bring people into your sales process. A well-writing and updated company blog will accomplish this goal, raising your organic search results, creating linkable content, and helping you to educate your audience. All of these outcomes will help you bring in welcoming leads that have been pre-qualified through a Google search for relevant terms or by reading similar content that links to you. A blog can provide many benefits for your company or organization, and almost all of them relate to Inbound Marketing.

Twitter is another key ingredient of successful Inbound Marketing strategy, a way to deepen relationship with costumers. The currency of your business should be relationships. Twitter, blog and forums help to share the company’s culture with the world, help to learn more about your customers and make easy for people to communicate with your company. When we started using twitter and Facebook we saw that people were talking about us there. Even that we have a blog, e-mail and we answer the phone. We just want to make it easy for our costumers to communicate with us. Now people help us to do the support and answering questions. What we are learning is to listen and let the others do the talking.

One dilemma many businesses struggle in social media is determining the right balance between personal and professional. When employees are representing the company online, what polices and guidelines should there be in place? Do companies really have a say in what an employee might post to their twitter account if the post is not related to the business?

When you hire people into your company, they already have their own online network developed. So don’t try to put a work face on them and encourage them to be themselves. Many of your customers are brought in through the personal relationships of our team members, friends, networks. People tent to use their personal profiles when participating where there are personal relationships.

Your company should implement a separate business account that a specific and dedicated team within the company must manage to ensure that the tone of the company message and branding stay consistent. Keeping some style guidelines the company can allow employees to write articles for the blog, twitting, and posting on Facebook but using editors that ensure the content is relevant and fits with the company or organization brand message.

Some word of advice for businesses that are just getting started with social media and how to make Inbound Marketing practices the key ingredients to success:

• Tell your story, because is what people respond to.
• Quick follow up to comments. Always remember you are setting the tone for your community.
• Be open and treat people as you would like to be treated (my mom always just to tell me this all the time.) This builds trust, which is the foundation of any great relationship and social media is all about building relationships.
• The wonderful thing about communities is that they serve as a living breathing focus group. If you listen right you can probably learn everything you need to know about your customers and business.
• Social Media is a way of doing business; it’s not a campaign. It needs a long term investment, support and organizational commitment. The results will not be easy to tie to direct outcomes, but the impact of a community that is well nurtured grows rapidly.

In addition, there are many other forms to create relevant content that will bring interested visitors. Offering e-books for download; hosting webinars, and developing microsites will all attract leads that are interested in your offerings and are avid to engage in a conversation with you about your organization. Another important element is make sure that your site is optimize to close leads into deals and engage visitors once they land on your website. This requires that you create constantly quality content and try new ideas to bring traffic to your site.

The leads you gain through Inbound Marketing are pre-qualified and are looking to buy your particular product or service. This enhances your chances of making a sale and makes a big difference on the relationship you can build with that customer. They come to you ready to spend!

If you sell someone on your services, there’s a cautionary skepticism about spending their money with you.

By keeping with these Inbound Marketing practices, you will successfully bring in new leads and grow in authority, having said that, it won’t happen overnight. While Inbound Marketing will save money and time, it does take a generous commitment and patience. You won’t be at the top Google result overnight, but by making a long-term commitment to Inbound Marketing you will see results.

Have you seen success with Inbound Marketing? How much did your organization saved in advertising dollars? We’d be thrilled to discuss your current marketing efforts and help you to earn new and qualified leads through Inbound Marketing.

Alirio Pirela is Founder of Pirela Creative Solutions, Creative, Love Analytics, Blogger, Designer, Art Director and Content Marketing Strategist working as a Community Manager for several small businesses, providing tools and advice for social pros and business owners. @aliriop

Post filed under Blog, Content, Facebook, How to, Inbound Marketing, Marketing, marketing strategy, Outbound Marketing, SEO, Twitter and tagged Content, Inbound marketing, Leads, Outbound Marketing.