Outbound Is Out and Inbound Is In

Billboards, billboards, billboards.  Our society is inundated by TV ads, radio ads, newspaper ads, pop-up ads, and yes, like I just said….billboards. This kind of advertising reminds me of fishing with a very large net for very small fish. You expend a lot of energy to throw the net out there and hope you manage to snare just a few of the fish. A lot of resources spent for a relatively small return.

This is outbound marketing. Outbound marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on finding customers by building brand awareness through advertising and promotion, or interruption marketing. In contrast, there is inbound marketing, or getting found by the clients that are already actively looking for your service.

So now that we know what it is, how do we achieve that? There is a myriad of ways to go about this and I could spend all day talking about those various things, so I am going to focus on the single most important aspect of inbound marketing, your time.

Maybe you thought I was going to say something like SEO, or keyword research. No, it’s the time you spend.

Think about this, if you are a small company you have three basic techniques at your fingertips.

• Blogging/Social Media Marketing
• SEO
• Pay-per-click

It is near impossible to outsource these to someone who is not intimately involved with your company. So, it is up to you, and you must spend your valuable time on it.

Blogging and Social Media Marketing:

Too many out there believe that this is all about press releases. They are dead wrong. Blogging requires the ability to effectively write about your company and it’s product. In itself, it is a blend of information, and sales techniques (an area that I am working to improve upon). On the social media platforms you must spend time, not only networking, but then keeping your audience interested. It takes time to write, and it takes time to tweet. Once you’ve done it for a while you start to figure out how to be more effective in shorter periods of time.

SEO:

You must commit to on going SEO. It is not a one time thing, done by your web designer, but a practice that must be continuously worked on. You must continue to find more keywords, create more content, based on those keywords, and build links that support a higher ranking for those keywords. Who out there knows your company, your product, and your clients better than you? It follows that you are the best person out there to find keywords related to all this and to produce viable content about just what it is that you do.

Pay-per-click:

Pay-per-click requires the least amount of time but you must constantly manage the efficiency of it. PPC advertising is very effective but you cannot simply set it up and let that be the end of it. Would you hire a marketing person and not keep an idea of hie effectiveness? No, and the same applies here. Write copy, design landing pages, monitor conversion rates…Yes, more time.

Blogging, and social media platforms will support SEO, and you can utilize PPC to define keywords. Like I keep saying all this takes time. I would advise that you see a professional to help you define exactly the right path for you. This way you will waste as little time as possible.

Seriously, how much time is this going to take?

There really is no set answer to this, and anyone who does have a pat answer, you shouldn’t hire. It is because there are so many factors going into this that I recommend you do get professional help. When it comes down to it, you will get out of it, what you put into it.