Yesterday a successful business owner asked me an honest question: “Why should I care about blogging?” Traditional sales tactics are working well for him. The business is growing and sales reps are crushing quotas with tried-and-true prospecting techniques. “Is it worth my time and investment?”
As more businesses discover inbound marketing, they often jump to the benefits and overlook what has to be done to achieve those benefits. The concept of inbound is straightforward: providing useful information to your existing customers and potential buyers will increase loyalty, help you be found online and viewed as a trusted source of information, create leads (and better qualified leads), and help your sales team close new business and upsell existing customers.
Yesterday evening, I was visiting with a friend who is a project manager for a construction company that builds high-end homes. It got me thinking. How crazy would people think you were if you expected a new home to be built in one month? Yet that is sometimes the perception of inbound lead generation. That there is a switch we can flip to turn on an inbound marketing engine and acquire quality leads. However, it takes time. And it depends on what type of house (or marketing strategy) you are looking for. If you’re looking for a standard neighborhood house in a typical neighborhood (or a standard online marketing package), then it takes less time. You can have a standard neighborhood house built within 90 days. However, if you want that high-end, custom home, you know you’re looking at about a year if you want it done properly, built to last and built to impress.
In preparing for a previous webinar on New Green Marketing Strategies with Jordan Darragh of PrintReleaf, I’ve uncovered some very interesting data about the market for green solutions. I’ll have to admit that until yesterday, I thought that “green” was nice window dressing on the real meat of the value proposition to a prospect. However, my eyes are being opened to the reality that there is a growing market demand for green business solutions. (more…)
As I talk to business owners every day, this is a common statement. But the question that always follows is, “What search terms do you want to get found for?” Typically, the answer is, “We want to get found for ‘product [insert city name]’ or ‘[insert product brand and city name]’”
While it is certainly not a bad thing to be found for these keywords in your city, the real question should be, “What are people searching for related to what we sell.”
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