5 Inbound Marketing Tips for Busy Business Owners (part one)

If you’re a business owner, you know that time is the most valuable resource you have. You’d love to be one of those prolific CEOs that tweet or blog several times a week and has stellar inbound marketing, but where would you fit that in? Even if you have a marketing person on staff, you still have to involve yourself in your company's strategic planning. How can you do that without sacrificing sleep or time with your family?

If you’re using HubSpot for your marketing, there are quite a few tools to help you make the most of your marketing efforts. In the next several blog posts, I'll be sharing some tips for getting the most impact out of your time and effort. For today, let's talk about two of the biggest building blocks of relationships with prospects: blog content and e-mail subscriptions.

Blog Content 

Blogging is always a hard sell for business owners because it can seem like a huge time commitment, but here are some easy steps to get quality content quickly and painlessly:

1. Look through the last three emails in which you've had to clarify something a prospect. You’ve now got three blog post drafts. That was easy! There’s a good chance that any topic you’re having to repeatedly explain to individual clients isn’t clear on your site, and could stand to have some light shed on it.
2. Write it all out at once. This may mean setting aside a little bit of time, but it will save you time in the long run. Address the most common questions, objections, and problems that your clients or prospects might have.
3. Have someone edit it, or run it through the Hemingway app for advice on where your wording is unclear. 
4. Give it a snappy title (here are some pointers).
5. You’re ready to go with a post! Hit publish and share it on social media (more on that topic in the next blog post).

Now, in one big step, you have bulked up your website content, created a new page that can rank for search terms, given your social media accounts something to point to, triggered your email subscriptions, and you’ve created a new tool in your sales arsenal to boot. You can now point people to this article, give a little bit of context for their unique situation, and move on to the next item. 

Time commitment: at least an hour, but if you find yourself hashing out the same points in individual e-mails, this is a will be a time-saving measure in the long haul. Also, the more you practice this, the quicker you will become. I love this article for great advice about getting into the habit of regular writing.

Email Subscriptions

HubSpot makes it easy for visitors to your website to subscribe to your blog. Every time you publish a new post, it gets added to the queue with no extra work on your part. In case you're worried about overwhelming your readers, don't fret! If you’re running your blog on HubSpot’s blog tool, then readers can customize how often they hear from you. Whether they want a monthly digest, or to get everything as soon as you press publish, the choice is in their hands, with just a little bit of set-up on your part. If you still want to write a newsletter to keep in touch with your prospects and clients in addition to your blog posts, you certainly can, but using e-mail subscriptions to share your written content keeps the lights on without a ton of additional effort.

Time commitment: 15-20 minutes to set up in blog settings and add to forms, an additional 15-20 minutes to put together an automated welcome email for when new readers subscribe.

In the next blog post, I'll share some pointers about using social media tools to share your content and connect with prospects without a huge time commitment. 

Interested in learning more about using your blog to grow your B2B business? Check out our free guide!