“I’d love to blog, but I don’t have the time/manpower/motivation!” This is an expression I’ve heard many, many times from my small business clients. So typically despite their good intentions they don’t blog and then end up complaining that they’re not getting any leads from their website.
At the Morris County Chamber of Commerce Business Technology Committee (whew!) we had a great presentation from John Kullmann of Macrosoft Inc on how blogging and inbound marketing worked for them. About a year ago John took the bold move and moved the company’s marketing resources and switched them from traditional methods (telemarketing, promotions, etc) to inbound marketing methods (focusing primarily on blogging for SEO and content). His presentation started with a slide that contained 20+ companies from around the world that in the past year had found their way to one of Macrosoft’s sites and had requested either information or proposals for services. These were companies that previously would not have been marketed to traditionally but had determined for themselves that needed John’s services.
After a year of blogging regularly based on keywords identified by their in-house analysis, incorporating video and images into their blogs and regular follow up to leads via e-mail marketing the results have been nothing short of staggering:
- Traffic to various Macrosoft websites has gone up anywhere from 200% to a whopping 900+% on one site!
- Their video channel on YouTube has had 27,000 views of 101 videos
- And more importantly they’ve attracted new clients from outside of their normal sphere of influence – they’ve created their own new sphere of influence by becoming the vocal, highly visible expert in their field.
John was lucky in so far as he had a team in place to do some of this work for him. Most small business owners don’t have a “team”, it’s either just them or maybe they have a secretary too, so it’s clearly a much harder nut to crack. But YOU (the small business owner) are the expert in your field and by shifting emphasis and budget from traditional marketing efforts (that probably aren’t working!) to inbound and content marketing can still have big returns.
If you’d like to have a discussion about your marketing efforts and how they might be better focused please contact me.
Posted by John Tully
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