If you have read any online marketing article in the last 6 months, you already know the power of Ecommerce Inbound Marketing and have heard the many reasons why you should be engaging immediately. But the engagement part is not always so easy, especially for small to mid-size companies. The limited resources to dedicate to blogging, social media marketing, link building, and keyword optimization can be especially hard to accomplish because of the lack of dedicated personal available.Below are 4 Easy Steps that will help small companies engage in Inbound Marketing Tactics to successfully utilize their resources and win the ultimate goal: generating more profits.
1. Map Out The Terrain
Any tactician knows that the one of the most important elements to winning a battle is knowing the terrain you are fighting on. Map Out your Inbound Marketing Terrain by compiling a list of all the sites and communities you can engage with. Twitter and Facebook are the obvious ones. You need to expand your reach by identifying where your customers are. If you sell light duty truck parts, you may want to research community forums where people post photos of their customized trucks and engage with the communities. Search Google for terms like “Custom Truck Forums” and you will see a list of 10 on the front page. Make a list of every site your customers are at, then rank them in importance from 1-10. Pick out the top 3 or 4 and start commenting in the forums and engaging with the communities. Your goal is to create a map of your social media engagement. For ultimate results, create your own forum and encourage you EXISTING customers to engage in YOUR forum!
2. Prepare Your Troops
Invest in training for your employees and develop procedures that allow extraordinary things to be accomplished by ordinary employees. Your Inbound Marketing campaign is war. You have to infiltrate your customer base and win their dollars. Properly preparing your troops through programs such as HubSpots Inbound Marketing Certification is a great first step in winning the war. Make sure your employees are not bringing a knife to a gun fight. Prepare them with online marketing guns through proper training. The more you put into your employees, the more you will get out of them. HubSpot’s training can take as little as a blocking off several hours a week for 2 weeks. Pick two or three of your most internet savvy employees and have them get certified.
3. Target Small Groups
When you first start engaging with services such as Twitter, you will quickly discover that there are millions of people tweeting every hour. It is impossible and unproductive to target every user on Twitter. You need to use services such as TweetDeck or HootSuite to search for terms being tweeted to define your market. If you sell mobile storage, then you might want to target terms such as “moving services”, “portable storage”, “mobile storage”, and “moving help”. These terms are more likely to be used by your customers and will start to define a smaller and targeted audience for you to engage with on Twitter.
4. Fight The Easy Battles
One of the most overlooked groups for Inbound Marketing success is right under your nose with your EXISTING CUSTOMERS! These people have already found your store and thought enough of you and your products to spend their hard earned money on your products. Reward them with incentives to purchase more of your products. Make sure you are including a card or flier in their package with a special coupon code for their next order. Encourage your customers to signup for newsletters that are primarily coupon based. Be creative. Tell your customers about Facebook or Twitter contests you hold regularly that include prizes of free products or super discounts.
Nothing is ever given to you in war. You have to earn everything. You have to hustle to win. You have to the heart, the determination, the will-power, the strategy, the fortitude, and most importantly - the people to win. Your primary investment has to be in your employees whom are prepared and focused on generating profits through Inbound Marketing.
