The Best Inbound Marketing Tips For Business Owners

  
We work with many small to midsize business owners every day, running their inbound marketing campaigns for them. As you can imagine, some are more successful than others and and a few - well... they just don’t seem to work, so we let them go. These are what I like to call the wannabes. They want the benefits of inbound marketing and they say they “wannabe” doing inbound marketing but they just don’t put the right effort into it. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to outsource your inbound marketing, but it does take the right kind of effort.

So here are my best tips for you, the business owner, to follow when beginning an inbound marketing program.

Tip 1: Don’t Try To Do Inbound Marketing Yourself

You're a smart person, you pick things up fast. After all, you started your own business, so you can certainly learn to do inbound marketing - right? Right. But as a business owner the last thing you need is another set of tasks on your plate. You should be working on your business not in your business. Oh... remember that concept?  The biggest stumbling block to small business growth, one that I see every day, is you and me - the owners. How many days do we lose working in our business instead of on it?  

So don’t take on inbound marketing by yourself. Your role as the business owner is to set the strategic goals for inbound marketing. Don’t get caught up in the tactics. Some of inbound marketing’s tactics can be very seductive. Don’t get seduced by them - keep your distance and focus on setting the long-term strategy and goals with your team.

You would not believe how frequently we see business owners falling in love with one of the tactics being executed in their campaigns. When this happens they lose sight of the big picture goals (increasing sales) and get stuck in the weeds (why is that ad not converting). It would almost be comical to watch if it wasn’t costing them so much in lost opportunities.

Tip 2: Don’t Be A Wannabe

I touched on this in the intro. Inbound marketing takes a certain mindset - sort of a mental shift in the way you and your staff currently approach marketing. As the business owner and leader of your company you will need to understand and embrace this new mindset. If you don’t it will certainly fail. We have seen this type of failure several times.

Even if you chose to outsource your inbound marketing to a firm like ours you still must take the time to understand the why of inbound marketing. Without that understanding you will find yourself getting bogged down in the weeds asking questions and delaying deployment. In the end your ROI will suffer.

Tip 3: Don’t Delegate Inbound Marketing to Existing Staff

Your existing staff can’t do inbound marketing. There...I said it. Sorry. They just can’t do it. It has nothing to do with their abilities or intelligence; it has to do with their balls. They need the balls to tell you what you don’t want to hear. That just doesn’t happen with existing staff.

There are many times we have had to tell clients, “no - we are not going to do that”, because we know it doesn’t work or it violates inbound marketing principles. As an outside agency we really only care about getting results for our clients. We don’t stroke egos. This is not a position your existing staff can afford to take with you.

Your staff would also need the time to learn the new methodology as well as time to execute the work and that is where we as business owners get in their way. We still expect all of their other responsibilities to also get done. So what happens? Do I tell my boss he is an idiot for expecting all of this, or do I just ignore this new inbound thing that probably wouldn’t work anyway and keep my job?  What do you think happens?

There is an exception to this - If you, the business owner, truly embrace inbound marketing principles and you have the resources available you could free up existing staff and allow them the time to train, develop, and begin executing an inbound marketing plan. But this requires a large commitment on your part and your staff’s part. There is long ramp-up time for this and what if it doesn’t work? What do you do with that staff?

So what should you do? This brings me to tip number four - bring in help from outside experts, at least in the beginning.

Tip 4: Do Enlist Outside Expert Help

There are real benefits to outsourcing your inbound marketing to a firm that is experienced in it.  First; you will see results much quicker than if you did it yourself. An agency that specializes in Inbound Marketing will be able to quickly develop a plan and begin executing in a fraction of the time it would take your in-house team to. They also have the benefit of having already made plenty of mistakes and will not need to repeat them on your account.

Second; it will almost always be less expensive to outsource your inbound marketing campaigns to a firm that does this full-time. Here is why - It takes at least four different functions/people to successfully run an inbound marketing campaign. You need a marketing strategist, a web developer, a graphic artist, and a copy writer. You would need to pay 3 to 4 staff members to cover these skill sets and yet you only need a few hours each week from each of them. By outsourcing, you have access to all of these skill sets and typically at a price below the cost of a single employee.

Third, if you’re really set on doing this in-house, it’s still best to start with a professional firm for a few months to get you on your feet and help teach your staff to take over the day to day functions of running the campaigns. This insures a successful start with minimal disruption to your existing staff.

In Summary:

  1. Don’t Try To Do Inbound Marketing Yourself

  2. Don’t Be A Wannabe

  3. Don’t Delegate Inbound Marketing to Existing Staff

  4. Do Enlist Outside Expert Help

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inbound marketing tips business ownersYou're a business owner like me and you have heard a lot about this new thing called inbound marketing aka content marketing. So you want to jump in and get started with it - right? Well you probably shouldn’t.  I’m not saying that it doesn’t work, because it does work. I’m saying that it won’t work for you if you just try to jump into it.