Inbound Marketing For Startups

Many startups have a plethora of things to worry about when launching their new product or service. They have sales, marketing, operations, finance, and maybe even internal human resources challenges to tackle – but an inbound marketing strategy for startups? That’s not quite so common, although it really should be. Find out why inbound marketing for startups and small businesses is so important.

One of the biggest mistakes new entrepreneurs and founders of startups make is failing to incorporate a solid inbound marketing strategy for their company. This is partly because they’ve never heard of inbound marketing or have heard of it but don’t know what inbound marketing for startups is – or it’s made to sound complicated so they tend to shy away from it. (Spoiler: it’s not complicated, it’s just a matter of digging a little deeper into content marketing for startups.)

Additionally, startups that house small marketing teams often don’t implement inbound marketing tactics. That’s normally because they are so overwhelmed with getting their digital campaigns up and running while learning about the competitive landscape that other marketing initiatives get put on the back burner.

Or maybe it’s a start-up that doesn’t have an in-house marketing team or any marketing experience at all.

That’s where we come in.

So What Exactly Is Inbound Marketing for Startups?

Inbound marketing is a way to attract strangers of your brand to your site by using blogs, social media, and other channels to provide them with high-quality and relevant content that piques their interest – it’s basic content marketing.

The basic idea of inbound marketing is that once this “attraction” has taken place, these strangers become visitors to your site at which time you can convert them into paying customers with clear calls to action and contact forms on relevant, helpful, interesting landing pages.

Once they submit their contact information via your form, you have a lead that you can follow up with and convert to a prospect that you can contact using your email drip campaign.

Then you can hopefully close your new prospect and turn them into a customer as you impress them with your sales expertise!

Finally, you can follow up with great customer service to make sure your new customer is happy and hopefully refers you to someone else.

Should I Be Doing Inbound Marketing For My Startup?

Yes! If you don’t create an inbound marketing strategy for your small business after reading this blog, then I have failed you as a marketer. More and more startups (and businesses in general) are integrating inbound marketing as a key way of generating leads, which in turn directly impacts their bottom line.

It’s not the latest trend that will fizzle out, but rather the start of an integral piece of your ongoing marketing strategy. According to Search Engine Journal, inbound leads cost 60% less than outbound leads. That’s pretty amazing considering the rise in costs of paid search ads.
Additionally, Hubspot notes that blogs give websites 434% more indexed pages and 97% more inbound links. Think of the SEO value you can gain from producing some awesome blogs.

Let me reiterate, yes! You need to be doing inbound marketing for your startup, yesterday! It may take time to put the groundwork in, but the results you will gain from inbound marketing can be exponential – and help to get your startup off the ground by reaching a relevant target audience.

Do I Need A Big Team To Do Inbound Marketing?

You don’t necessarily need a big team to do inbound marketing for your startup or small business, but you do need the right talent and skills, along with at least one person committing time each week to oversee or execute the plan. The amount of time required will depend on how much content you are producing and how quickly you want to see results. 

The skills most important to get started include copywriting, at least some basic design skills, the ability to update your website, and social media marketing. If you have people on your team with those skills, you have the basics. If you don’t, another option is to have someone on your team oversee the efforts and hire a marketing agency to execute the work.