When you’re a small business owner, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by all of the products and services you’re being bombarded with on a daily basis. Which ones are essential to your business? Which ones can you do without? Those answers can be difficult to come by. But there is one thing that is absolutely essential to any successful business plan: inbound marketing.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Unlike outbound marketing, which involves proactively seeking out and presenting your product or service to potential customers, inbound marketing relies on a more passive approach. Rather than bombarding potential customers with sales pitches, inbound marketing involves identifying what the target audience needs and how best to attract those potential customers by meeting their needs in a way that your competitors can’t.

Why Inbound Marketing is Essential

Many small business owners make the mistake of thinking that passive means less effective, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Inbound marketing is highly effective because it will naturally draw your target audience to you in a way that doesn’t offend their senses the way bombarding them with advertisements will. Why? Because over time, customers have developed "ad blindness" in response to aggressive, outbound marketing techniques.

But inbound marketing eliminates this problem by making it easier for your target audience to find you on their terms, not yours, and that ultimately means a much higher conversion rate. Not only that, but inbound marketing is so effective that you can do far more without increasing your advertising budget. In fact, inbound marketing has been shown to decrease the cost of leads by as much as 60% over traditional outbound marketing approaches.

SEO is the Secret Behind Inbound Marketing

It’s easy to see the benefits of inbound marketing over ineffective and costly outbound marketing techniques, but the question is, how do you implement this idea? The answer is simple: search engine optimization or SEO.

In order to attract your target audience on the web, you need to make sure that your business’ website is easier to find than your competitors. That means your website needs to be optimized for the search engines and for "keywords" that are highly relevant to the product or services you are offering. Once your website is optimized for these keywords, your target audience will be able to easily find you by simply searching for what they are interested in at the major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. And since they are already interested in what you are offering (as demonstrated by the fact that they are actively searching for it), these highly targeted visitors are more likely to convert into leads and sales, which ultimately improves your bottom line.