Marketing for your small business can be challenging.  You may struggle with lack of resources like budget, time or manpower or have less visibility and brand awareness. You may feel like a little fish in a pond full of whales.   However, there are strategies which your small business can enlist today that can bear fruit.

Big or small, the tenants of effective inbound marketing, when observed, will help your business grow. Inbound marketing helps you position yourself in such a way that your ideal customers are looking for you rather than the other way around.  You will attract them through valuable content that helps your market reach its goals rather than interrupting them with disruptive ads or smooth-talking sales tactics.

To elaborate, inbound marketing is about three steps:

• Attract—Get the attention of your target market with your website and blog. They have questions and you have answers!
• Engage—Move those prospects along in their sales journey though conversational and relational tools like email and continuing to provide valuable content.
• Delight—Keep that relationship going through continued stellar service, listening, and expertise.

With these steps in mind and remembering that a small business’s resources must be allocated wisely to have the greatest return, it is good to have a grasp on what those steps look like in real time.

How do we work smarter rather than just harder?

1. Know Your Market

2. Know How to Reach Your Market

3. Provide Value to Your Market

KNOW YOUR MARKET

We have said this before, and we will say it again.  And probably a few times after that.  You HAVE to know who your audience is.  Map out your ideal target market and access their needs.  Create buyer personas. Find your target market and stick to it.  By getting to truly know the wants and needs of your customers and potential customers, you will know how your company can help them.  And if they don’t know how you can help them, chances are, they aren’t going to come to you for help.  (See how this works?)  This also speaks to making sure you know your company’s unique selling proposition.  Your why.  And the why that sets you apart.  The why that tells your market why they pick the little fish over that dang bloated whale.

KNOW HOW TO REACH YOUR MARKET

Once you know your audience, you need to know how best to communicate with them.  What channels should you use to reach them?  Your best bet is to look at where they already are.  You wouldn’t just stand on the street corner and shout “Look at me!” like a Newsie.  No, you need to go to where they are already talking about their needs and be there to chime in with your helpful and engaging information.

The most common channels used in inbound marketing are:

• Blogging
• SEO
• Email Marketing
• Social Media, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn
• Pay Per Click Ads
• Branding

PROVIDE VALUE TO YOUR MARKET

You’ve gotten to know your target market. You’ve got just the thing to help them address their pain points. You’ve figured out where your prospects are already searching for their answers.  Now, for the love of all the fish in the sea, what do you say to bait the hook?

While we cannot give you the words to say, we can let you have a peak into our content marketing tackle box.

As a HubSpot Solutions partner, we like to follow’s HubSpot’s Pillar and Cluster model.

We look at the needs of our market and say, “Okay, so what questions are they asking?”  And then we set out to answer them in a series of ways: through blog posts, infographics, social media posts, informative videos, and email campaigns. Each content portion a way to further draw in our target audience and “just keep swimming…”

For example, you are currently reading a blog post about small business marketing.  That topic: small business marketing is, in fact, the main pillar topic.  To which there are other blog posts, aka cluster content, about more specific topics that help clarify and support the larger theme of small business marketing.  They are all linked together through hyperlinks which shows Google and other search engines that they are all related to one another, thus increasing the likelihood that you cast your line into the place your fish are already searching for bait.

Each of these steps, while simple to define, require effort.  You will be working smarter as well as harder, not instead of harder.  But that’s okay.  Hard work is how the little fish gets big.