WISP Resources: 5 Inbound Marketing Tips You Can Implement TODAY

Regardless of your business, marketing can get really expensive, really fast. When we launched our company, we knew that marketing was important, but we also new it was equally important to remain lean wherever and whenever possible which is why we’ve come to know about many effective, low-cost marketing tips that work well.

We know the same is true in the WISP world – marketing is a must, but so is a lot of other costly investments throughout your project(s). We also know that there are two important layers to WISP marketing:

• The overarching marketing of the business (inbound marketing) and
• The proactive outreach to get customers to sign up for specific new services (outbound marketing)

Based on what’s worked well for us and what we know can work well for WISPs, we’re sharing 5 inbound marketing tips that you can implement TODAY. Or tomorrow. Or whenever you’re ready. The point is that these tips are pretty easy to implement and you may find yourself saying “Why didn’t I think of that?” as time or two.

Spoiler Alert: Be sure to read this entire post because there is a sweet offer for MORE tips free marketing tips at the end!

Website

A website may seem obvious, but we’re going to take it one step further. We recommend you build (or have someone build you) a website:

• Using WordPress
• Using a stable theme
• Using reliable web hosting.

Let’s break this down:

WordPress

Stable Theme

Reliable Web Hosting

We’re getting a bit specific here because we speak from experience. Our website initially was not built on WordPress and therefore the other two things also didn’t apply. Once we shifted things, it was a night and day difference with web traffic and analytics.

Blog

Ideally, you will have a blog as a page on your website. If that’s out of the question and you can only do one thing at this time, start with a blog. More specifically, set up the WordPress website with the quality theme and hosting and then just start with the one page. Here’s why:

New content is online gold. What do your social media followers love? What do search engines love? New, quality content. Publish useful information for your audience on a regular basis and new eyeballs will also begin making their way to your website based on search engine results.

Google Analytics

Even if you have Google Analytics running on your website, have you ever logged in to your Google Analytics account to review the stats? In a nutshell: The info you gather about your website traffic using Google Analytics will blow your mind. You can see:

• How many people have visited your website
• Where those people came from (how they arrived to your website)
• What pages they are visiting
• How long they are spending on those pages

Imagine having a website with no stats – how do you know what to blog about or promote on social media? You don’t. Trust us, we know. Very early in our business we discovered the website didn’t have Google Analytics installed. It was a “You can’t be serious!?” moment, for sure, but you live and learn and spread the word as far and wide to anyone who wants to listen to make things easier for other businesses in the future!

Email Marketing Software

Although “mailing list” can have an “ick” connotation, a healthy mailing list (meaning the people on it signed themselves up rather than you signing them up without their permission) is an incredibly powerful asset in a business.

Social Media

You may think this will be typical “make sure you’re on LinkedIn” or “make sure you’re on Facebook” advice. Nope. Although, you absolutely should have a company page on LinkedIn and a business page on Facebook. Instead, we’re going to share some secret sauce that 1. you’ve probably never considered and 2. works:

Pinterest – Stay with us! Pinterest has a reputation for being a platform where people…um, what do people do on Pinterest, exactly? Sure it’s a place that people “pin” recipes and create “mood boards” for painting their living room. But here’s the thing you need to know about using Pinterest for businesses like ours:

Posting (quality) content to Pinterest can result in better search results on Google.

We see it with our own eyes every day:

• We create a new “pin” whenever we have new content on the blog. This takes less than one minute to do.
• Over time, our Google Analytics have revealed traffic to our website from Pinterest and our Pinterest Analytics reveal hundreds of impressions. So less than 60 seconds of effort per blog post results in more and more free eyeballs on our content. When you think of it this way, you can’t not add Pinterest into the mix!