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I’m not sure about most people, but when someone asks me to describe Inbound Marketing, I can’t help but think of David vs Goliath. Inbound Marketing, specifically using amazingly awesome content to draw in qualified traffic to your website, is the armament that smaller companies can use to take lunch money right from under the noses of bigger companies.
For a while, its been a pretty good secret how successful this whole process can be. Answer some common questions from you industry with blog posts, and suddenly you’re ranking better for critical long tail keywords, building inbound links, and authority for your site. You’ve got a couple of guides and whitepapers out there to offer in conjunction with your content, and now you’re converting some anonymous eyeballs into known visitors that you can nurture into a sales process.
This secret is starting to leak out. A few news outlets have been talking about a relatively new site on the internet, ManoftheHouse.com. Here's the story over at Australia's The Age. Man of the House is a content-heavy site, that focuses on being a better man, but unlike outlets such as Maxim and GQ, it's geared towards the married man and the father. Oh yeah, it's owned and operated by Procter & Gamble, fine makers of Gillete razors and Old Spice deodorant.
I must warn you, stalwart defenders of Inbound Marketing, that Goliath is figuring out how successful Inbound Marketing can be. While P&G has a historical record of being on the cutting edge (when it comes to advertising as a giant consumer manufacturer, at least), it won’t be long before other large companies in the B2C space start doing the same. Soon after that, companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and IBM will realize that there are ways to adapt techniques that work B2C, and try them out with B2B sales.
So what’s the ONE thing you could do right now to prevent this?
Beat them to the punch. You've still got another year or two - maybe three - before the biggest B2B companies decide to stop producing yawn-inducing press releases and start trying to create remarkable content of their own.
Start creating your own content. These companies have more money than brains, which means they’ve got no problem hiring anyone they can find on the internet willing to write for them. When they have an army cranking out blog posts, it will be extremely easy for them to capture any of the low-hanging fruit in terms of long-tail keywords.
You need to meet them with a well-entrenched beachhead. Meet them with a blog filled with hundreds of well-written, insightful, and helpful blog posts that have already gobbled up the low-hanging fruit. Meet them with article after article that has solve a process problem for your customers, as these are the kinds of content that you will build your empire with.
Start using your content to turn visitors into leads and customers, now while you have a head start.
Photo Credit:
~Twon~
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