It is becoming increasingly obvious in the B2B arena that inbound marketing works well for businesses, even the smaller ones. 

A recent study released by the Hinge Research Institute revealed a remarkable correlation between profitability and online lead generation among professional services firms. The study concluded:

“Firms generating 60% or more of their leads online are 2X more profitable than those generating less than 20% of their leads online.”

You can read the blog for more information 

You may be wondering how inbound online marketing can work for your small B2B business.  Here are 3 possible ways:

Inbound Marketing Works By Targeting Those Who Are Seeking Your Services

Outbound marketing involves directly contacting potential clients to tell them about you and your solutions.

To use a fishing analogy, your company is expected to cast a wide enough net in order to capture at least a few interested members from a huge audience. 

Conversely, inbound strategies let potential clients who are specifically interested in your offerings find and come to you. This concentration on being found by interested parties rather than going after them is certainly an efficient and effective use of the fewer resources available in a smaller business.  

This efficiency can also be appreciated for B2B companies with limited marketing budgets and multiple time constraints.

Inbound Marketing Fits Small Business Budgets

When you are looking for services where do you go first?  I know I personally rely on the internet and specific search engines to find everything these days. I believe almost anyone can create an effective Boolean search on the internet that will allow them to locate what they need within a few seconds. 

Small businesses, even those with a focus on B2B marketing, should be using inbound marketing tools like social media, SEO, and internet advertising, to help them be easily found via search engines. 

Many of these tools are free (or inexpensive), efficient, and very user-friendly. 

Even the smallest of B2B business will find that inbound strategies are affordable and viable, especially with their high levels of efficiency and effectiveness.

Inbound Marketing Maximizes Integral Exposure

Most people think that Google Maps is just for finding directions. Today smart local business owners worldwide are using Google Maps as part of their internet marketing campaign. Google Maps has the ability to increase sales. Every business should take advantage of this powerful business generating tool. There is no reason for you to be left behind. It is free, it is easy, and it literally puts you on the map against your competitors. 

When someone on the internet searches for a term that is relevant to your business. You want your company name to come up within the search results. Preferably as one of the first results. A business can optimize certain things to increase the likelihood of being among these first top results.  This is called Search Engine Optimization. Typically it can be very costly and time consuming, but with large rewards. Right now, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be applied to Google Maps. For example, if you type the word ‘Plumber’ followed by your local area in Google. You will see that Google Maps will display a lists of plumbing companies in that specific area. 

You can do some very simple things to attract more business from this Google Maps listing.  This is huge, it levels the playing field for the small business. The obvious benefit here is that it gives the small local business a fighting chance against bigger national companies that also service your local area. If you are a small company, you may not have the budget to optimized your website in order to rank higher in the Google search results. However, with Google Maps SEO you get to be on this precious piece of digital real estate without having to come out with a huge budget. In fact your best strategy here is offering a discount to customers who review your business. You’ll notice that most businesses don’t have any reviews. You can actually dominate your local market by just filling out all your business information in Google Maps and having real customers review your service.

As a small business who uses Google Maps, you are targeting local customers. Believe it or not, most customers prefer supporting smaller local businesses. So if you have a handful of great reviews, you should be able to easily compete with the larger national brands. 

However, if you want to start to include Google Maps into your marketing campaign, it is best to consult an SEO specialist. This would save you a lot of money and avoid having to go through trial and error experience as they would set up everything for you seamlessly. If not, be sure to do proper study and research on effectively using Google Maps for your small local business.

So we know that we have many social networks that you can sign up your small business for. This phenomenon of Social Marketing is here to stay, and if used right you have a huge opportunity to really grow your business. Let’s look at the two networks that everyone needs to use right now. The current heavy weight king of social networks is Facebook. This is the biggest, that baddest, and most established website in the social scene. You can pretty much do everything that you need to do on Facebook to grow your business, without any cost to you. 

The key with Social Marketing is engagement, and it’s no different with Facebook. If you want your fans to keep coming back to your fan page, you need to have an open line of communication with them.  

 You can easily do this by:

• Asking Questions
• Answer Questions
• Posting Photos, Videos
• Individually Thanking Your Fans
• Offering Facebook Only Specials

You also don’t want to overwhelm your fans. If your Facebook fans don’t think that your status updates are useful, they can just as easily un-fan your page. So be sure to keep this in mind before blindly posting every few minutes. Ask yourself this question before updating your status, “Does this information benefit my customers?” If it doesn’t, don’t post it.

The next big player in the social network landscape that all small business owners should use, is Twitter. I really like Twitter for the small business. Mainly because they train you to be brief and concise. Since you only have 140 characters to use, you better use them wisely. This allows you to think like a Newspaper Editor. Think about this for a moment. If you read news paper and magazine headlines, you pretty much have an idea of what the article is about. But if you need more information, or you find the headline interesting you’ll read the entire article.

You should use your Twitter status exactly like this. Give a short, very to the point headline, with a link back to a page on your site with all the information that they need to know. Twitter is very powerful to the small business owner. You can search for people that have questions and problems in your field, and help them just by answering a question. How amazing is that? 

The benefits of social marketing are many, however you shouldn’t see this activity as a task. You should see this as a genuine way to interactive with your audience. As we all know, people like doing business with people that they like.