Traditional (Outbound) Marketing

In the good old days, we would use a combination of the following techniques to reach our target audience:

• Attend international exhibitions (very expensive when you add up the cost of renting space, setting up a booth, flights, hotels and time, not great for keeping stress levels low and a good chance that your target audience might not even turn up in today’s economy of reduced travel budgets.)
• Advertise in trade publications (expensive and no way if you are reaching the target market or of calculating ROI).
• Buy email lists or database information and cold call or cold email (lower cost but not very effective since most communication will be recognised as spam)

This type of marketing is known as Outbound Marketing since you are reaching out to the target market in the desperate hope that they will listen. It is expensive, inefficient and often when it brings in leads, these prove to be unqualified and unsuitable.

Online (Inbound) Marketing

Today’s online tools allow us to create content that will be finely tuned to the target market and, if we do things right, will have a high chance of appearing before them and generating interest. The content must add value and is not necessarily trying to sell them anything.

Content means blog postings, articles, videos, news, case studies, brochures, give-aways, or anything else that provides value to the person consuming it.

The 7 steps of Inbound Marketing are shown in the diagram on the right but here are a few key points:

6 Things to Remember

1. Inbound marketing is all about Content. Once you have created it, then promote it using social media, your blog, twitter, pay per click and email.
2. Use LinkedIn to its fullest. LinkedIn is arguably the most relevant social media platform for B2B. Conduct searches using your relevant keywords to find people you might be able to contact directly (consider paying for a premium account). Add your blog to your LinkedIn profile and consider paying for a LinkedIn PPC campaign.
3. Don’t ignore Facebook. 1 in 9 people in the world are on Facebook so even though you may not consider it relevant for your business, the likelihood is that the people you are targeting are there, even if they’re not doing business there. Don’t try selling to them on FB, but create your business page and promote it.. you just might find them Liking your page. Remember though… people expect something in return when they Like your business page!
4. Blog regularly. Companies that blog have 434% more indexed pages, 97% more inbound links, 55% more website visitors and generate 67% more leads than those who do not.
5. Make sure all your pay per click campaigns link to Landing Pages where you can measure performance and offer a call to action.
6. It is easier than ever to sell direct to the consumer today by developing eCommerce on your website. Inbound marketing principles are similar to those described in this article and generally the biggest perceived barrier to selling to the consumer is the logistics.  Please see this page for more information on this subject..

Inbound marketing has a significantly higher ROI than all other types of marketing and you are encouraged to start using the techniques described here. Finding distributors for your products is far more efficient than ever before because of the availability of tools that can help bring in qualified leads.  Selling directly to the consumer is feasible due to the possibilities of eCommerce and fulfillment services.  It is up to you to take advantage of these and help your business grow.

We would be happy to talk to you about working together to help your business grow.  To contact us and set up a time to talk, please click on this link.

Which takes me back to my first client who asked me to create a business plan and a presentation for investors.  I happily agreed but when I got down to it, found huge holes in the core technology and flaws in the research he had undertaken.  I advised him how to fix things but he would have none of it and disagreed with me with an intensity that was quite alarming.  ”I’ve contracted you to write a business plan and prepare a presentation and that is what you shall do!”  I did it, got paid on time but didn’t put my name on the document since I disagreed with almost every word.  Onto the second client who asked me to prepare and implement his marketing strategy and a new set of marketing material.  I showered him with my worldly advice, my work was superlative, he hung on my every word and worshipped me like a demigod but unfortunately didn’t pay up and we nearly ended up in court. (We’ve since remained friends!)

I’ve moved on since then and learned a great deal about doing business with Small/Medium Enterprises.  These are the ones who most need my help but are least able to pay but nevertheless, there are some great products and services out there, some wonderful people with good intentions and best of all, potential for all of us to succeed.

This week I have been invited to make a presentation at the Israel Export Institute to the 20 Israeli companies who are going to the Cosmoprof exhibition in Hong Kong in November.  I did some quick research about these companies online profile… grading them according to whether they had a twitter account, a blog, used google adWords advertising etc.  Here are the results:

What this shows us is that out of 20 companies, 2 don’t even have a website, only 9 of them track the visitors to their website, only 4 of them have advertised on their website that they are going to be in Hong Kong, only 1 has a Linked In or Twitter account and none of them maintain a blog or run a basic Google AdWords advertising campaign. Keep in mind here that out of all these ‘features’ which will get a company noticed, only one of them actually costs money…. the Google AdWords account. The rest are totally free, apart from the cost of the person that maintains the channel.

The combination of all these marketing tools is commonly known as Inbound Marketing and reflects the function of a modern website and online strategy in attracting people to your website.  Traditional outbound marketing broadcasts indiscriminately and, as in a newspaper or TV advert, it is impossible to know if the advert has had any affect or anything about the people who have seen it. With inbound marketing we focus on 2 stages:

1. Attract people to the website using a wide range of techniques (some of which were ‘graded’ in this exercise).
2. Make sure that when they get to the website, they make contact or take an action that can be followed up.

So is the cup half full or half empty?  Well if we take the 9 possible marks that the 20 companies in the Cosmetics sector could have got in my grading exercise, 78% of companies got a score of 3 or less (See chart on right showing the distribution of the scores out of 9).

Now this is clearly shocking but as long as the patients can admit they have a problem it is not too late to send them to therapy and do something about it. At a relatively low cost, websites can be upgraded, linked in profiles can be created, google adwords campaigns can be started and companies can start to get the benefits of  inbound marketing. Unfortunately, its a little late for the 20 companies going to Hong Kong in November, but lets see how it goes on Tuesday and I’ll let you know!

Warren