In
terms of a traditional marketing campaign involving direct mail, printed
material and telemarketing — inbound marketing is comparable in terms of
difficulty. The costs run about 15 to 25 percent lower. Some different skills
are required but none is particularly hard to learn. Your existing sales and
marketing team may have the requisite skills, so amping up your inbound
marketing can be seamless.
Now
let’s look at one approach our research revealed as particularly effective for
generating sales leads and customer contact.
First,
you will want to gather your existing marketing messages together and get them
in an electronic form. You will need the words in a text file. News releases,
PowerPoint presentations and marketing collateral can be put in a single folder
in Windows or a Mac, for example. If you have graphics, you will want those in
that folder, as well. I like to use Web standard graphic formats, and I avoid
proprietary file formats and versions of art designed specifically for
printing, a favorite medium of the outbound school of marketing. If you have
videos or audio records, you need to get these in the folder, as well,
particularly if you want to use these in your marketing campaigns.
Second,
you will need a free blog. You can sign up for a blog service that offers
fill-in-the-blank templates. There is a desire to create original designs for
blogs, but I think you will be better served if you use a free template and
make minimal changes. We learned that most people do not visit a blog to read
content. The information is consumed using aggregation services. If you are not
familiar with a news aggregation service, take a look at www.alltop.com,
www.dailyroation.com or Google News. These services process notifications that
new stories have been posted on a blog and provide a convenient one-stop shop
for blog information.
Third,
you will want put in place a method to convert your existing information into
news items for your blog. Because you are recycling existing content in
electronic form, the stories are little more than edited versions of what you
have already approved. For examples of blog posts about a company’s products
and services navigate to Access Innovations’ Taxodiary at http://taxodiary.com
or I/Gear Technologies’ Redefining Monitoring at http://redefiningmonitoring.com.
Fourth,
you will want to let people know that your blog is available. You accomplish
this by taking these actions. Turn on the RSS function. RSS means “really
simple syndication” and free blog systems offer this as a standard feature. Then
issue a traditional news release using your public relations firm or a Web
service, such as PR.com at http://www.pr.com or Free Press Release at
http://www.free-press-release.com. Neither of these services is perfect and you
can find many low-cost news release services. Finally, notify your existing
customers and prospects by email that you have set up a blog to provide them
with news and information about your business.
