3 Simple Steps to Build Your Small Business Sales Pipeline

Small businesses face unique challenges when it comes to marketing their company to a wider audience and building a sales pipeline of qualified leads. You may find that limited marketing resources make your business feel at a disadvantage when compared to major players in the industry. But don’t worry, you’re not alone. You can overcome this challenge by using 3 simple but effective marketing techniques that generate higher quality leads for nurturing through the process of inbound marketing.

Traditional marketing efforts such as TV ads, direct mail, and cold calling are becoming less effective by the day. In fact, it is surprising to note that only 28% of people who are cold-called are actually willing to engage in a conversation, and a mere 1% of cold calls actually end up in a meeting. For your small business to generate more leads, it needs to implement an inbound marketing approach that responds to the needs of its customers.

Follow these 3 simple steps for your small business to get the best results from inbound marketing.

1. Develop a solid Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing involves developing articles, blogs, video, and other media that contains helpful information for your target audience. In this way, customers will be able to find your products and services when they come looking.

Inbound marketing efforts would be ineffective without a solid content marketing strategy. You should realize that creating unique, relevant and attractive content for your target audience is one of the best ways of attracting customers.

You’ll also be surprised to note that only 37% of businesses have a well-documented content marketing strategy. For any small business, creating valuable content can enable them to compete with larger companies for market share.

2. Leverage Social Media

With over 2 Billion active social media accounts, the marketing potential of social media platforms has no limits. Small businesses can leverage social media by spreading their unique messages to niche audiences across various platforms.

Your business first needs to understand its target audience and how they engage with content on social media. You can then optimize your content in a manner that appeals to your social media targets in order to build a following.

Using a mix of video, articles, tweets, and pictures is an effective way of raising brand awareness-and-recognition on social media.

3. Develop a sound Lead Nurturing strategy

Nurtured leads typically make 47% larger purchases than leads that are not nurtured. As a result, a solid lead nurturing strategy will enable your small business to obtain loyal customers who make large-and-timely purchases.

A lead nurturing strategy works by identifying how close a lead is to making a purchase, and engaging those leads with content that is relevant to the buyer journey. For example, leads that are heavily browsing product pages can be targeted with product-specific content, while leads that are just getting familiar with your products and services should be provided with more awareness-level information.

Using the 3 best practices mentioned above, small businesses can leverage the power of inbound marketing to develop effective-strategies for generating more leads-and-increasing ROI.