How to find new business customers with Inbound Marketing

It's not a trivial question! How to find new business customers with Inbound Marketing ???

How to find new customers is one of the most important challenges for a company. Not just because it's a way to expand your business, but also because it is calculated that 80% of your future income will be created by only 20% of current customers. Looking for new leads as a planned activity, to be implemented regularly and not once, therefore becomes essential to ensure lifeblood for the future of your company.

However, contact research requires time, ideas, tools and consequently represents a cost: for this reason it is essential to find effective methods, capable of optimizing the expenditure of resources, bringing as many results as possible.

Find new customers or be found by them?

There are many methods and strategies for finding new customers. The difficulty is understanding who they are, where they are and how to reach them. It would be much easier if customers found us, attracted by our contents and the quality of our proposals.

This second way is not only possible, but is increasingly traveled and is called inbound marketing. If traditional marketing, based on advertising and on the purchase of promotional space to acquire customers, is rapidly waning, also due to the growing costs of advertising and ever lower ROI, inbound marketing is constantly growing.

In favor of the latter, there is also the required investment: inbound marketing activities cost 60% less than outbound onesrelated to traditional marketing.

How to actually use inbound marketing in yours digital strategy? Becoming less and less advertising promoters and more and more content publishers.

Here are some ideas you can put into practice right away.

Create valuable content

It may seem trivial, but it is not at all. For those who have always dealt with marketing in the traditional way, all corporate content is aimed at selling, directly and explicitly. With the content marketing the perspective is completely different: it is not promoted, it is informed. Your company exists, but remains in the background. By starting to like your content, people will start following your activities, gradually transferring the positive judgment from your articles to your products. It's a long process, but one that keeps people attached to your brand far more firmly than any hard-selling business. Only by understanding this will you be able to appreciate the benefits of inbound marketing to find new customers.

Think content for users (and therefore for Google)

Having a corporate blog well edited, with quality content and a good editorial calendar is a fundamental requirement for inbound marketing. But you also need to think about how to make this content visible to Google: new customers don't know you yet, so they'll never find you by directly searching for your company or product name. Rather looking for topics of interest to them, which match those of your articles. So take care of the positioning, optimizing your contents from an SEO perspective and inserting the keywords appropriately. But above all think about your potential readers: be interesting for them, you will be interesting for Google too.

Extend the life of your content

Creating valuable content takes time and energy, between research, planning, writing, publishing and promotion. Even if it is aimed at finding new customers, it is cost effective for your company. Smaller than any advertisement, but still tangible. It can therefore be a good idea to exploit the content as much as possible once it is created. For example, it can be declined in multiple formats, so as to reach more people and increase the visibility of your story over time. An article with a list of how-to tips could become a video or presentation for Slideshare, turn into a podcast, or become part of an e-book that you send to your email contact list.

Stimulate conversation

To find new customers with inbound marketing, if the first step is to interest them, the second is to keep them. Every contact obtained with the inbound is precious and must be cultivated with every possible means. The moment your reader and potential customer finishes the article, don't let them walk away right away. Facilitate and make sharing and commenting opportunities obvious, so they start a conversation with you and other users. Finally, without being invasive, insert a call-to-action: invite the user to leave his e-mail address, in exchange for the possibility of downloading in-depth content or receiving your advice on a topic related to the article.

These are just a few tips for using Inbound Marketing to find new customers. Are there others that you find effective?

Tell us about your experience with a comment in the box below.