The Ultimate Guide to Inbound Marketing for Small Businesses in 2020

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If you’re looking to double down on your marketing efforts and attract more customers in 2020, it’s important to first start thinking like a customer. As a consumer, are you fully engaged when you come across a traditional advertisement, such as a commercial on TV or the radio? What about a billboard?

If you’re like most consumers, it’s likely that you block these types of advertising tactics out, both mentally and literally. Everyone knows that commercial breaks are the best time to refill your bowl of chips. A spam email or call can easily be blocked by your email or phone service provider. As consumers in the digital age, we’ve learned to ignore all types of advertising that is all around us. 

That being said, how can businesses advertise to prospects without spending way more money on their marketing efforts? What is the most cost-effective way to win over new business when consumers are already being bombarded with interruption marketing? The answer is to strategically attract these customers to your brand through inbound marketing.

What is inbound marketing?

Rather than interrupting the lives of your target audience with advertisements that they don’t want to see or hear, inbound marketing aims to attract, engage, and delight your customers by creating value and trust in your brand. 

How do you do this? Your first focus should be on the issues your customers face on a daily basis—particularly the issues that your business can solve. By changing the focus to what you can help your target audience with, you’ll start to build more credibility, making customers more likely to buy from you, and ultimately, more loyal to your brand.

In 2017, Hubspot reported that 71% of the world’s organizations primarily conduct inbound marketing tactics. That means that if you aren’t currently using an inbound marketing strategy, 3 of your competitors are!

How much do inbound tactics cost?

If this is your first time learning about inbound marketing, you may think that these new tactics will be super expensive and turn your marketing budget on its head. That’s not necessarily true! In fact, inbound marketing tactics have a higher ROI than traditional tactics, according to 53% of marketers surveyed in 2018 (versus 16% of marketers that stated that outbound/traditional tactics give them a higher ROI). Even if implementing these strategies cost more upfront, you’ll see that they are much more effective in reaching more of your target audience and converting them.

Let’s face it: if you’re a small business, you want to make sure you’re getting the most out of every dollar spent on your marketing efforts. Make sure you’re achieving the highest ROI possible with a marketing strategy that targets users that are more qualified to convert into your customers.

What are some examples of inbound tactics?

Here are some elements of a strong inbound strategy:

• Pay Per Click (PPC) Ads: When you type something into Google to search, some of the first results you see show “Ad” next to them. These companies have developed paid campaigns on Google Ads to show as the first result, depending on which search keywords they use. 

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): If you scroll down a little further on the Google results page, you start to see websites and companies that organically rank for the search keywords. These companies have focused on optimizing their websites and landing pages to include these keywords, and Google has ranked them according to user intent. 

• Social Media: Consumers, and even other business owners, spend a ton of time on social media platforms. Having a presence for your business on these platforms allow your brand to interact with your target audience where they are already spending time. Social media platforms also allow business pages to run ads to reach an even wider audience.

• Content Marketing: You’ll soon learn that in marketing, “content” is a huge word. Broadly speaking, content is the information that your business shares with its audience. This information can be shared in a ton of different ways, like blog posts, videos, newsletters, cases studies, and eBooks. Although your target audience as a whole may have a favorite way that they like to receive your content, you should still try to share information in a variety of ways to make sure you’re reaching more people.

• Website Landing Pages: Although landing pages can fall under the content category, it’s worth highlighting that your website is arguably one of your most valuable tools in your content marketing strategy. Your goal should be to transform your website into a hub of information for your prospects and customers. 

How can my small business implement an inbound strategy in 2020?

It may be tempting to jump right in and hit the ground running with inbound marketing, but there are some questions that you need to answer first. It’s good to write down some information about your business, your goals, and most importantly, your customers, in order to create the most effective inbound strategy for 2020. 

1. Set Goals.
   How do you measure the success of your marketing efforts? Define all of the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you will track to make sure your inbound strategy is on track.
   One way of doing this is to work backwards from your revenue goals. To do this, you need to know your lifetime customer value (LTV), which indicates what a customer is worth over the lifetime of your relationship with them. Use this number to work out how many new customers you need to onboard to reach your revenue goal. Then, find your average lead-to-customer conversion rate (what percentage of leads turn into customers?), and use that to determine how many more leads you need to earn. From there, using your average visitor-to-lead conversion rate (what percentage of visitors turn into leads on your website?), determine how many more visitors you need on your website to reach your goal. Check out the diagram above for an example of this formula.

2. Define your ideal customer.
   You want to create value with your target audience. This requires some research into what makes them tick—or what gives them headaches. Build a buyer persona around your ideal customer. Document their demographics, psychographics, pain points, values, goals, and anything else that can clearly define this person to someone outside of your organization. Give them a name too!
   For example, if you sell handmade teddy bears made from recycled clothing, you don’t want to list your target persona as “anyone in the US that has a small child”. Instead, you want to narrow down that persona to be “Parents in the Midwest who prefer to shop locally, purchase sustainable goods that are higher-priced but last a long time, and have children between the ages of 3 and 9.”
   Now, go a little deeper; work with your sales team or survey current customers to determine what problems they face on a daily basis that your company can help them with. Additionally, ask some questions about where they go to get information on solving this problem. This helps you determine not only WHO you are creating content for, but also WHERE you should make that content accessible for them. 

3. Conduct keyword research.
   Go even further with your questions to your customers. Ask them what specific words or phrases they type in to Google to look for a solution to their problem. In this step, you’re starting to perform some keyword research for your website’s SEO efforts. There are a ton of free SEO tools that you can use to validate some of these search terms as well. Keep in mind that you want to look for keywords that have a high search volume but not a lot of existing content out there (meaning, you want to find keywords that have a keyword difficulty below 60%). 

Check out my free worksheet linked below to work yourself through the research and documentation portion of your inbound implementation.

Now that you have your goals, target customers, and keywords, the next step is to develop a full content strategy that focuses on attracting new users to your website, engaging with those users to convert them to customers, and delighting them to keep them coming back for more from your brand. Create content in different formats that accomplishes your goals for each of these stages, and optimize your website to guide visitors through this cycle smoothly. After some time monitoring your success and making the necessary adjustments, you’ll soon find that more and more qualified customers are finding you and learn to trust you. Those usually end up being the longest-lasting and mutually beneficial relationships.