Why SMEs should Opt for Inbound Marketing?

When you’re about to start a small or medium enterprise of your own, it’s important to make people aware of your venture and the products and services you offer.  Inbound marketing is the new marketing method that uses the latest technology to attract customers. This marketing method is opposed to the traditional, interrupting and less effective outbound marketing. This method uses the new strategy of reaching costumers by providing them precise and useful information reaching them according to their convenience. As traditional marketing is focused on finding costumers, inbound marketing is focused on the idea of getting found by costumers. So inbound marketing brings qualified costumers to the SMEs.

Next Gen Marketing
Inbound marketing is the result of some recent changes in the behavior of consumers. It does not involve the conventional and expensive methods of regular newspapers and television advertisements, billboards on roads and telemarketing calls. It is mainly based on three things--good content, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and social media.

The primary advantage of inbound marketing is its target audience which is all the persons who access the internet. A good content is the key to successful inbound marketing. Users will browse away from your page if they do not find the right information or get confused by the presentation. Similarly, SEO helps the consumer locate the site and its content. SEO practices, on-page and off-page, help SMEs in achieving a higher position in search engines. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. prove to be the first platform for a potential buyer or customer.

Social media networks form another important aspect in inbound marketing. Their range is spread across many channels where people browse on a regular basis. With a substantial sharing of the content, potential buyers are attracted to company's products or services.

Saves Time
A survey has established that inbound marketing, even though time consuming, costs 62 per cent less than outbound marketing or related efforts. It grows over a period of time and only improves in its quality. Also, with inbound marketing, one is directly connected to the target audience. In inbound marketing, one only approaches leads which are interested in the product and provides better chance for selling. It also works as a wisely investment, whereby SMEs can benefit from a long-term marketing strategy rather than a short-lived one such as print ads or video presentations, etc. The right investment on optimized content which can show up on various search engines confers a long lasting touch to the marketing effort.

Flexible Solution
Inbound marketing also offers a flexible solution to SMEs which can modify its campaign from time-to-time as per their requirement. Adopting closed loop marketing analytics from possible leads also helps SMEs to improve their marketing month after month. The system works much better than conventional e-mailing systems where the company has to spend quite an amount just to reach out rather than waiting for consumers to connect with them in the inbound marketing methodology. Often, these e-mails create negative publicity for the SME as the message is branded as a spam or unwanted forwards.

As a power pack of all these advantages, Inbound marketing could benefit SMEs in multiple ways making them more successful.

FollowUpThen - Free and Efficient Email Reminder

Emails are the most common method of business communication today. Especially for the small and medium businesses, Emails are the first, simplest and the fastest way of communicating with anyone and everyone. The major most challenge which is faced with Emails is, many a times, Emails, which have to be followed-up with get lost and we lose track of the same.

Example, if you are a sales person and your client asks you to follow up in a week, obviously you can put enough reminders which keep reminding you of the fact that you have to follow up with your client on this particular Email. Such missed Emails also result in lost business many a times.

Followup Then ensures that you remember your followups on Email
The video below shows, how followup then leverages the power of Email reminders and ensures that you are always in touch with your follow-ups and that you never miss one.

This is the simplest way of ensuring that you always keep your follow-ups on your Emails strong and that you never miss a single follow-up.

How to use followup then?

Team IndiaMART Knowledge Services is committed to enable SMEs with tools, tips and techniques to help them reach up the value chain and hence achieve the next level of growth. For more information on how you can create new opportunities for your business, drop in a comment to this post and we will get in touch with you!

Measure The Success of Your Email Marketing Campaigns

One of the strongest tools for any SME to reach out to its intended target audience, is Email Marketing. Its low cost, its fast, easy to use and engaging. Email marketing has all the basic features available for it to be widely used by start-ups and SMEs as the first approach to increasing outreach in the online world.

But how do we measure the success of the Email Marketing Campaign?
Many companies must have done Email marketing campaigns before, but getting the right ROI from it, requires a deep understanding of some basic fundamentals, which will help you generate numbers from your Email marketing campaign.

Click Through Rate [CTR]
To put it simply, this is one number you get when your intended user actually clicks on any of the embedded links in your email message. This essentially gives out the interest of the audience into your message and also about the quality of your content, such that the useer is actually able to take an action which you intended for them.

So how do you calculate CTR?
Its a simple formula: Number of Unique Email Clicked/ (Total Emails sent - Emails Bounced) * 100. This will easily give you the CTR as a percentage, which obviously will help you understand the success ratio of your campaign.

Generally your Email marketing provider/ software (if you are using one) gives you the CTR and the core details, which defines the success of your Email marketing campaign. Overtime this number also helps you understand your user better and hence helps you improve your call to action and design of the Email campaign.

Conversions
Simply speaking, conversions represent the number of Unique Emails which led to a buying decision (sale)/ OR a subscription to what you intended to. You can easily track conversions by creating a landing page for all the traffic coming from your emails onto your website, and have a form t be filled up there. The number of clicks which land onto your landing page Vs the form filling up, will give you a fair idea of how effective your Email marketing campaign is.

The Time Given By The User
How about getting to know, how much time did your user spent on your Email, which sections of the mail did he/ she see the longest etc? These numbers are available with your email marketing software provider. These can really help you understand what is your user excited about and what is the time being given by the user on which part of the Email.

Going Viral Rate
This is one statistic which is not implied for every email marketing campaign, but to most of them. Generally when marketeers create the Email marketing campaigns, they try and include a viral aspect to it. Virality basically means some element in your Email campaign, which engages the user and asks him. her to forward the campaign.

Source: http://knol.google.com/k/-/-/qenyuuefykiu/zeqzy8/email-marketing3.jpg

There are many such online tools available, which are benefiting the Small and Medium Enterprise segment. To know more, get in touch with the experts at IndiaMART Knowledge Services. Do drop in a comment to this post to let us know what else would you want us to share about!