Many companies like sticking to their tried and true methods of marketing, even if the results aren’t the same as they used to be. So why should you consider inbound marketing for your business? Inbound marketing has one main goal: lead generation. When it comes to amassing new clients and customers, generating qualified leads is your best friend. But there are plenty of other advantages to implementing inbound campaigns as a part of your marketing strategy, without compromising your business in order to adapt.

Times Are Changing, and so is Marketing

Because the ways we communicate has changed so drastically, so has marketing. Since marketing aims to engage in a conversation with potential clients, one of the best ways to foster that conversation is by keeping up with the digital age. This doesn’t mean that you will have to sacrifice the values of your business or what your business is about in order to make the leap. Since there are plenty of ways to customize how your business modernizes itself, you can still retain a sense of individuality and charm.

What this actually means is that you might want to rethink age-old marketing methods like flyers, cold-calling or even commercial slots on television. Since paying bills online has become the norm, most people barely sift through what they get in the mail before throwing it away.. Cold-calling is a no-go, too. Fewer people have land lines and anyone can easily block unknown numbers and callers with 800 numbers from their smart phones. Even commercials are a gamble. While huge companies like Coca-Cola still benefit from product placement and commercial time, many smaller businesses really don’t benefit from spending money on commercials, given just how much people DVR their favorite shows or prefer online streaming to get their entertainment.

It Costs Less

Printing out flyers and paying local stations to air your commercial costs big bucks. If you cut back on these old school marketing methods, you can save a lot of money – and in regards to flyers, pamphlets and cards, you’ll be saving the environment, too!

Instead, you’ll want to get several other things to carry your company into the future: a mobile-friendly website, the right social media accounts, and a blog.

Social media accounts are free to make, though there are some added advertising features that may cost some extra dough, but only if you’re interested. They are relatively low-cost, and chances are you probably won’t even need them. As far as websites go, there are plenty of free designs out there for you to use and play around with, but if you want more features or a sleeker design, then you may have to shell out some cash. The draw, however, is that these higher quality options consist one-time fees and often include features that can be reused, repurposed and updated as needed. It definitely beats redesigning and reprinting an entire fleet of flyers, right?

Also, the old adage “time is money” is really no joke. Finding the time to make thousands of individual cold-calls, write, cast and film a commercial, or even find places where you can tout printed material can cost you a lot more than you think. Once you have a website up and running, it doesn’t take nearly as much time to keep it updated and running smoothly.

You Get an Edge on the Competition

Even if you aren’t sure that your business is ready to take the leap into the digital age, your competition certainly will be. So many entrepreneurs, business owners and freelancers are jumping at the opportunity to gain more leads. If everyone else gets ahead, where does that leave you?

Not only are more businesses incorporating inbound marketing, but less and less people are interested in older, tired forms of marketing as well. This means that many of your potential clients are not finding you, even if they could really benefit from your products or services. If you don’t have what it takes to get their attention but your competitor does, even if they provide a slightly different service or are not as good of a fit as you might be, the prospect may go with the competitor over you – and that’s because they may not even know that you exist!

Strong Web Presence

Speaking of knowing whether you exist, a great way to establish your brand is with a strong web presence. Inbound marketing can bolster what you offer to the web ten fold. The internet is usually how your clients will find out about you and determine whether or not they want to use your products or services.

Since inbound marketing includes blog post material, you can bolster your website so that it is more than just a static billboard. f your website can offer information beyond simply outlining what it is that you do, you are more likely to draw in clients and customers by piquing their curiosity or by answering a question that they have about your particular field of expertise.

This is a great way to generate leads, especially if you offer some free materials or make relevant posts on social media that act a precursor for what you can truly provide as a business. For instance, if you can interest someone in a free PDF download, you can get their email and see if they are interested in similar material. If you have a Facebook page, potential clients and current customers can write on your wall so that you can answer their questions and concerns directly. This makes you appear more personable, and gives others a good sense of your customer service before engaging with you.

People can often tell when someone has the sole desire to sell them something. By engaging with prospects in conversation, you can learn more about what people may want from you and how you can help them instead of bombarding potential customers with the fact that you are selling something. By being helpful and personable, prospects are more likely to look into what you offer and genuinely consider your solutions.

You Can Be Found Organically

Being found is a huge advantage. When people are looking for a potential service or product, they often type a general description into their search bar and trust Google to give them the best results. Having a quality webpage, being available on social media and having relevant search engine optimized blog posts will guarantee you more web traction, especially from people who were brought your site via Google.

This is a great way to attract people who are actively looking for the services that you offer. Being easily searchable and offering quality content at the other end of that blue Google link is a sure way to draw someone in.

You Build a Reliable Reputation

All of these aspects of inbound marketing will help you build a solid foundation to grow your business long-term. Covering all of your bases is essential. If you provide quality blog or article content, people will be more likely to trust what services you offer or products that you provide. By being active on social media, your business can gain a bit of its own personality and allow you to answer questions and comments directly. By offering relevant, useful material and engaging in conversations with your customers and potential clients, you not only build a strong web presence but you establish a reliable one.

Being present and offering quality service encourages happy customers to share your page, your posts and your material – enabling your customers lot of the marketing for you. But you need to build up to this point, and the best way to do that is by integrating inbound marketing into your business growth plan.

The post 6 Reasons Your Business Needs Inbound Marketing appeared first on SocialCore Marketing.

1. Know Their Problem
Before going into the call, it is crucial to understand the problem that is impacting the business’ productivity or sales. If you come into the call knowing exactly how you are going to help them, they will be more inclined to listen to what you have to say.

2. Offer Your Solution
Once you figure out the businesses’ problem, you next need to let them know what you will do to help them, and the overall value of your services. Profit is important, and customers’ want to know if what you would do would be of impact to them.

3. Create a Plan of Action
During the call, encourage your prospect to describe their business challenges. Use this conversation as a way to provide a simple action plan that will help them overcome some of the challenges they mentioned.

4. Establish Credibility
Establishing trust by mentioning relevant case studies and examples of how you helped similar businesses. If you can, ask companies you’ve worked with to write testimonials for you as well. This will give your leads confidence in knowing that what you are offering is legitimate.

5. Maintain a Personal Relationship
Don’t treat your prospect as just another paycheck. They are people too, and like you, they want to be treated as such. Make it easy for them to know you want to help, and most importantly, always listen.

Sales calls are difficult for everyone. Remember, you are providing your prospects with a solution to their problems. Approach each call as an opportunity to help a business overcome their challenges and increase their bottom line. Yes, it’s almost always hard at first, but after a few calls you will get into a rhythm. The more you call, the more you’ll get a feel for what works and what doesn’t. Follow these simple steps and you’ll be helping new businesses in no time!

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There are many ways to accomplish this. Google owns 70 percent of the search traffic in the US. Their name has become a verb which keeps them in the front of everyone’s mind. You no longer search for answers, you Google for answers.

Rebecca Black wrote a song called Friday. If you’ve ever listened to the song or seen the music video it’s nothing to be impressed by. But on YouTube alone this one song has 52 million views. This is a because of a trigger that kept this song “top of mind”. Every time Friday rolled around the view count would spike.

As a small business owner you’re probably thinking that these are good examples that don’t apply to you. In short, I agree. You can’t make your company into a verb, it just happens. And trying to rename your company after a day of the week probably won’t help you much either. By using targeted inbound marketing tactics you can become top of mind to your target audience.

The post Top of Mind – Staying in Front of Your Customers Is so Important appeared first on SocialCore Marketing.

Even when using outbound tactics like TV advertising, brands still encourage their audience to engage with the brand in some way. Consumers now want to be a part of the action – even when it’s something as simple as voicing their opinion of the commercial online. This is where the idea of Social Media advertising comes in. Depending on how you want to showcase your brand, there are various types of media you can use.

I’ll briefly touch on three of the most prevalent forms of social media for businesses: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Facebook allows you to create a personal page for your brand where you can share stories, links, text updates, and practically anything else you can think of. You also have the ability to comment directly back to your customers, which will increase your brand’s credibility and authenticity. On Twitter, as mentioned before, businesses can use the hashtag to aggregate content. This matters quite a bit because the hashtag has almost become its own form of entertainment.  A tweet takes mere seconds to complete, but when you can get twitter users talking about your business, each tweet becomes an advertisement all in its own. The final social media outlet, Instagram, uses snapshots and pictures to tell a story of your brand. By using Instagram, this will help you put a face to your company’s name. You can put pictures of behind-the-scenes of your business and enable your followers to learn more about what your brand is like at its core.

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are the three most important Social Media outlets that you should be using on a daily basis if you always want your brand to be a part of the online conversation. Sure, it might be a little difficult getting started and learning the ropes, especially if this is entirely new to you. I can assure you though, social media marketing is now essential for a business to flourish. You could hate it, but it’s not going anywhere, and will only going to get bigger and bigger as time goes on. So what do you say, stick to the past and get lost in the shuffle, or upgrade your company to the 21^st century and get your brand recognized and talked about? It’s your decision- I say make it happen. If you need help, feel free to give us a shout!

The post The 3 Basics of Social Media – Is Your Brand Falling Short? appeared first on SocialCore Marketing.

Some companies fail because they have great marketing and a bad product or service. Other companies fail because they have a great product or service and bad marketing. This second scenario is often the most challenging for busy entrepreneurs to overcome. Most local dentists just want to work on being great dentists, that’s why they went into business after all. They don’t want to work on being good marketers.

This problem is what keeps companies ours in business.  We create and manage inbound marketing strategies to help business owners focus on what they do best. If you’d like a free marketing strategy session give us a call.

Let us help you like we’re already helping our current clients. Contact us and we’ll provide you with a free consultation to talk about your business needs.

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With the world becoming more social and connected through the internet, customers aren’t simply going to the nearest place of business. The average customer today first does online research about a company by examining their website, checking reviews on google, yelp, etc and checks for feedback on Facebook and Twitter.

Michael Luca, assistant professor at Harvard Business School, performed a study that showed a one-star difference in online ratings for restaurants translated into a 5% – 9% change in business revenue. If you’re like many small business owners that last 5% -9% is where the majority of your profit is.

Jonah Berger, associate professor at Wharton School of Business, wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review on book reviews. His research found that good reviews increased consistently increased sales by 32% to 52%.

Both of these studies demonstrate the importance for businesses to manage their online presence rather than be managed by them. Good business owners today don’t simply hope that customers leave positive reviews, rather they actively encourage customer participation in the process of spreading the word about their company.

Some business owners have extra time to manage this process but many don’t. If you find yourself short on time for this ongoing task of attracting customers through inbound marketing let Social Core Marketing help! We’ll provide a free game plan tailored to your business.

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