What is inbound marketing?

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I’m not sure if the term itself is new, but I first heard it used about six months ago. Whether the term is new is irrelevant the concept is not.

The most effective marketing strategy has always been one of educating the customer as to why your product or service is the best value for them. Notice I didn’t say lowest cost, but best value, it provides the best return on their investment.

In my book, Bottom Line Focus, I talk about marketing as providing useful information to your customer base that let’s them know you understand their needs or problems and provide them options for solutions.

But you can't help them understand your products or services and how they will benefit from them unless you understand their needs. You can't start building your branding and marketing strategy around a sales pitch about why your new "turbo widget" is the sexiest thing on the market. You must first understand why people buy turbo widgets.

What are they trying to achieve? Do they want to look younger, prettier, thinner, or more successful? Do they simply want to go faster? What do they want and why? 

Once you pinpoint your prospective customers' problems and needs, you must understand why your widget is the best solution available. If it isn't, you need to determine what you must do to make it the best.

Now, here comes the tough part. You need to convince your prospects to agree with you that your turbo widgets are the best. I say it's the tough part because in this age of the Internet and proliferating channels of communication, traditional marketing approaches – radio, TV, print advertisements, sales literature, and celebrity statements – are all becoming less effective. 

But actually, that's good news for small and mid-size companies. The Internet has leveled the playing field. Big companies used to be able to buy very influential testimonials. Today, Internet blogs and forums are the equalizers. Take any product or any brand and do a blog search on it. You will find dozens, if not hundreds, of comments indicating the marketplace perception of that brand. 

By employing Web 2.0 techniques strategically, you can make a big splash on a limited budget. With the rise of social media marketing, ingenuity is becoming more important than dollars. And it's been proven that consumers respond better to engaging dialogue than to expensive broadcasting. 

So what is inbound marketing? It’s providing enough useful information to your prospective customer base that they seek you out. Your company becomes the recognized expert in your field. Inbound marketing can be viewed as welcome marketing, providing free and useful information about their issue or need and offering great solutions. Traditional marketing can be called invasive marketing, blaring out price, or product features at a mass audience hoping some of the noise finds it’s mark.

While traditional marketing was once the accepted practice it never worked really well. A great direct mail program is one that gets 2% response. Now with the never ending array of TV commercials, Emails, newspaper and magazine ads, you need to find a way of reaching your customer that isn’t “lost in the noise”. Having them seek you out is by far the best return on your investment. You may have less traffic to your website or office, but the traffic you do receive will be much better qualified and knowledgeable about your product or service.

Use inbound marketing for better sales results

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First many of you are probably thinking what the heck is inbound marketing? It’s been around for a while but hasn’t had great exposure until recently.

Traditional marketing or “outbound marketing” is blasting your marketing messages outward. It can be in the form of TV commercials, newspaper and magazine adds, direct mail, email marketing and so on. The biggest question that surrounds this traditional method is how do you know your message is being heard?

Inbound marketing is establishing your company or yourself as the “subject matter expert” in your chosen field. You make relevant, timely, and current information,  that your potential clients are looking for, available, and they’ll find you. When they do you have a prospect that is directly interested in the products or services you’re offering.

As I said this isn’t a new concept, why then is this just getting exposure?  In a word, noise. There is such a glut of information thrown at us everyday it’s impossible to sort through the noise to get at the information we want. We are bombarded with email marketing, TV commercials that we all mute, direct mail that even if excellent provides a 2% hit rate. We are buried with stuff!

It is getting harder and harder to see an acceptable return on investment from traditional marketing methods.

If you can’t get the market’s attention, you can’t get them consider your products or services let alone buy them.

In my book, Bottom Line Focus, I talk about marketing being your platform to educate your market why they need the product or service you are providing, what to look for when they decide to buy in order to get the most value for their money.

The next step toward better sales results is convincing them that with all of the products or services available to them in your particular market, yours is the best value and the obvious choice.

Like someone said long ago, “build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door”. Update that and to say provide meaningful information and the world will beat a path to your website.

Lack of a better sales process to blame for most business failures?

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We read about businesses failing every day in the newspaper. In the articles documenting the latest list there are always reasons given for the failure, the economy is usually the number one cause.

I’d like to offer a different and less popular opinion. In most cases I’ve seen the reason your business fails is you!

Sound harsh? My experience as a business coach has proven this to be correct.

A great example of this appeared recently in the Tupelo newspaper. An article appeared with a list of restaurants that failed in 2009. The reasons given by the owners were “poor timing and the economy”. Tupelo being a smaller city my wife and I had visited all three of the establishments named over the course of the year so I was in an excellent position to review the article. All three restaurants had three things in common, high prices, poor service and mediocre food.

One in particular, a sandwich shop, that stands out in my mind had an ordering process that involved standing in line to order, and then moving to another station and standing in line to repeat your order and pay for it. Total wait for an expensive and really poor take out sandwich was over 45 minutes. Now this particular shop was located in a strip mall that was exactly four doors down from a Mexican restaurant that is not only surviving it’s thriving. Apparently the economy issues haven’t moved that far down yet.

The point is it’s easy to assign blame but it the long run it really doesn’t matter who’s to blame, your business has failed and you are left with the consequences.

Small and mid-sized businesses are critical to the national economy. A newsletter from the Small Business Administration dated September 2008 provides the following interesting figures about U. S. small businesses. It says the firms with fewer than 500 employees –

• Represent 99.7% of all firms with employees.
• Employ about half of private sector employees.
• Create between 60% and 80% of all new jobs during the last decade.
• Generate more than half of non-farm gross domestic product.
• Employ 40% of our nation’s scientists, engineers, and computer workers.

As important as these firms are to the overall economy all too often they are launched and operated without the resources needed to succeed.

I tell my clients to “find a need and sell the outcome”. Another way of saying it is find a customer base, determine their wants and needs and supply a cost effective solution. Many businesses start with the opposite strategy, develop a product and look for customers. Regardless of the movie line “if you build it, they won’t necessarily come”.

Most business failures occur for several reasons:

• Lack of a clear plan / vision/ direction.
• Lack of execution by management.
• Insufficient capital, or due to lack of a plan wasting the capital they do have.
• They don’t ask for help until it’s too late.
• They don’t understand their markets, their customers, or their competition.

There are other reasons of course, but strong well-run companies are able to survive downturns, the economic swings weed out the weak and poorly conceived.