Business Marketing and Technology

Life is coming at us much faster than 10 years ago, and the average individual is getting very good at tuning out traditional advertising methods.  They’ve got Tivo for TV commercials, Spam filters for unsolicited e-mail, and an RSS news feed instead of a newspaper.  These traditional ‘outbound’ marketing mediums are broadcasting a message that is getting filtered before it reaches your target.

A new wave of marketing, called ‘inbound marketing,’ is taking a different approach.  Instead of barraging the target with interruptions, inbound campaigns seek to position the company in front of the target when they’re looking for their services.  For example, an inbound campaign would focus around coming up at the top of search engine results for their keywords, social networking, and building authority and being a resource in their field.  In this way, when a target begins their search for the type of services the company provides, the company appears among the top in their industry.

I originally picked up the terms ‘inbound’ and ‘outbound’ marketing from Hubspot, a provider of internet marketing software, but quickly began to see that these terms are all over the industry.  I like a lot of Hubspot’s marketing theory and how-to’s (you can read them on http://blog.hubspot.com), but much of what they do revolves around social networks Twitter, Reddit, and Digg.  I think this works well for advertising to the technical types (which most of their clients are), but what if your target market asks ‘What’s a twitter?’

A blog I really like that focuses on Internet marketing is Court’s Internet Marketing School. Court brings up a very good point in his article about search traffic vs. social traffic - social traffic doesn’t convert well into clicks or sales.  People don’t use these social networks to find products or services like they use a search engine.

This is a nice seugway into how I have structured my marketing campaign (for Vanivo) to utilize social networking: 

1. I use the blog to demonstrate my industry knowledge about promoting businesses effectively using the Internet. 
2. I tell my friends (real life and virtual) about my knowledge by sharing these posts with them via social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, and Digg).  
3. Some of my friends will share my expertise with their colleagues who are interested in what I write about. My readership grows, and
4. I’m hired or referred by my satisfied readers because I have demonstrated my authority and depth of knowledge in the field.

On the flip side, I also focus on being found by my target audience on search engines.

1. Creating a large archive of blog posts/articles builds up my corporate website since it has a large amount of content relevant to web design and internet marketing.
2. Search engine spiders crawl my site and find this content, which searchers find when they use the keywords I’ve targeted. (Example: search Google for ‘Ultimate Craigslist Strategy.’ 6 out of the top 10 results are my article (or a reprint), and at least a few percent of my traffic each day is related to this article.  3 of the other posts are for video game strategy guides being sold on Craigslist.
3. In my articles, I link my website as a Portland Web Design company (or some variation), which tells readers (and search engines) that vanivo.com is important and relevant for ‘Portland Web Design.’
4. Potential customers search Google for ‘Portland Web Design.’  Since I have a large number of backlinks for this keyword phrase, my site comes up higher on the results page.  The searcher clicks the link to my site, and contacts us about designing their website and marketing their business.

These two examples are the main methods I use to conduct ‘inbound marketing.’  The third and most simple method is to post a relevant, attractive ad on Craigslist in the right category, using the strategies I outlined in the Ultimate Craigslist Posting Strategy Guide.
Take these tips and create your own inbound marketing campaign tailored specifically to your target audience.  If you’d like to talk more about it, my door’s always open.

Related posts:

1. Website Marketing SEO Rap
2. The 8 Most Effective SEO Techniques. Period.
3. Why I Converted my Blog to ‘DoFollow’
4. Search Engine ‘Optimization’ vs. Search Engine ‘Friendly’ - What You Need to Know
5. Guerrilla Marketing on the Internet - Brain Dump continued…

Tony Kau craigslist, internet marketing, seo, social networking, web design