Marketing brochures: general, colorful, printed pages containing basic information about your business, products, and services, usually including a phone number or website address, but overall not targeted, not measurable, and by most accounts, not that useful for gaining customers. If this is how you can describe most of your marketing materials - including your website, email blasts, social media, advertisements, and downloadable content - stop what you’re producing. Marketing should be building sales enablement tools, not brochures.

Content marketing is not an easy definition to pin down. When you Google this term, over 49 million search results come back. And this trending term has grown 500% in the past five years.

Ask any SEO company representative, and they’ll tell you that the fastest way to gain better rankings in search engines is to produce more content. More is better appears to be the motto when it comes to search engine optimization and rankings. And before Google (on which over 70% of searches is conducted) released its four major algorithm parts for search engine results quality, that was the truth.

In honor of Harry’s birthday and the release of the latest in the Harry Potter franchise by J. K. Rowling (yes, I know it’s a script, but hey, I don’t ruin your dreams by pointing out they’re only half-true, do I?), I’m giving you direct access to all of the knowledge I’ve gained since working with inbound marketing for B2B clients.

How do I know if B2B inbound marketing is a good fit for our manufacturing company? I understand where you’re coming from: after all, marketing your B2B manufacturing company is difficult. If it were easy, everyone would be doing the same things with stellar results.

Here’s our gauge for determining whether or not inbound would be a great fit for your manufacturing marketing needs. You’ll know that inbound marketing is a good fit if you’re experiencing the following at your manufacturing company:

Search engine optimization. Content creation. Social advertising. Viral video production. Banner ads. In the world of digital marketing, there are agencies that focus on each of these individual tactics. Then, there are agencies that focus on strategizing the combinations of these tactics that work best for you. Which do you need? And how do you know?

Inbound marketing, as opposed to outbound, is built to attract potential buyers to your business through educational content. Using B2B inbound marketing methodology, your website is a 24/7 salesperson that attracts, converts, closes and delights people who are looking for solutions to a problem that you can solve.

If your small business is utilizing only traditional media to try to attract customers, you may be feeling like you’re fishing: you work hard to prepare for the day, find what appears to be a great spot, cast your line or net, and then...wait. However, if you’re not using inbound marketing to grow your business, you’re fishing with a hole in your net.