The 4 Pillars of Local Inbound Marketing
The web has drastically evolved the way in which smart businesses handle their core marketing efforts. Local business marketers who understand inbound marketing can develop comprehensive web solutions that are sustainable, measurable, highly effective and cost-efficient. 
Inbound marketing, in a nutshell, involves putting yours business (or its web presence) in front of the people that want what you have to offer. The game shifted from hoping to be found to knowing you will be found, and understanding how to get yourself there.
At the Web Presence Group, we use what is known as the four pillars of inbound marketing to build awareness and generate a flow of traffic to our clients’ websites. Below we go into detail about each pillar and how you can adopt this approach in creating your local business’ inbound marketing strategy.
Express Your Value & Wisdom With Content
The best starting point is content marketing and the concept is very simple. You want to create quality, relevant, inspiring/enlightening/educational content that tells a reader that you know what they want and you have what they need. It is all about problem solving, and in a sense, the focus of your content really does not have to involve selling at all.
We use content marketing to “help” people find what they want and need. One of the best ways I have ever heard content marketing explained in relation to helping solve someones problem is to make content flow simple in a simple form.
If you have a service-oriented local business, you can use customer experiences to show how they have the same problem other customers have had and how you solved it for them. The sky is the limit with content marketing, and it’s one of the most organic ways to inbound traffic to your website.
The only thing is that you can just do content marketing alone. You need to implement other inbound marketing pillars to support the grand objective.
Voice Your Ideas on Social Media
The follow-up pillar content marketing involves leveraging your ideas (content) on social media. We all know about Facebook and many business have started to understand the true power of using social media. 
Getting your business established on social media sites puts you in the position share your content and ideas. The true power lies in your followers who share your work to spread the word about your ideas.
Additionally, and for SEO-inclined, earning social signals (“likes” and “shares”) and establishing a strong following can lead to a higher levels of credibility and authority in search.
We like think of content and social media marketing as the glue that brings everything (like SEO) to together.
Be Found Using Local SEO & PPC Advertising
Along with your content marketing you will also want to investigate local SEO. This is the process of finding what search keywords people are using to search for your product or service when they go to Google for their answers. Targeting keywords, optimizing your website for those keywords, and crafting your content marketing strategy around such a theme can be profound in become a local authority figure.
This allows you to place your company in search results where you know you will be found because you know people are searching those terms to try and find you. Remember, inbound marketing is the process of placing yourself where you know people will find you.
Let’s say you own an Art Supply store in Des Moines Iowa. It is a pretty sure bet that there are people going to Google, Yahoo and Bing use the search term “Art Supply Des Moines Iowa”.
Doing local SEO in conjunction with solid content marketing will no doubt bring you new customers. Think about all the things sold by an art supply store and you can find a range of possible search terms where potential customers can find you instead of you having to find them.
Another effective way to quickly place yourself in front of those looking for your business online is local PPC advertising. This involves buying what is known as “Pay Per Click” advertising which will get you listed exactly where you know potential customers are looking for you and right where they are searching, the first page of search results.
The great thing about local PPC is that it can be a very inexpensive method of advertising that will only cost you money when someone actually clicks to visit your website.
If you know you are placing yourself using local PPC ads where your potential customers are searching, they click on your ad and you have employed effective content marketing, there is a very good chance of you obtaining a new customer.
Conventional marketing involved buying emailing lists, post cards and buying ad space in hopes someone interested in what you were offering would see your ad or those bulk email lists would find a couple people that would actually open your email and find what you have interesting enough to check it out. Understanding the four pillars of inbound marketing or having someone that can employ these methods for you can mean creating much faster business growth than ever before possible.
