Business growth can seem harder than breaking rocks in today’s economic climate. Everybody’s looking for ways to save money – nobody’s interested in spending. Maybe Rainmaking can make a difference?

Rainmaking

with inbound marketing techniques might be something we should all use to drive business growth. Costs are close to zero. We have more control over our messages and targets. There are numerous channels we can explore to find the most appropriate for our businesses. We can get intothe long tail, avoiding the big spenders and reaching niche markets.

But what does rainmaking with inbound marketing look like? How does it work? What does it achieve? How do we measure it? How does it help business growth?

Compare our results with your own efforts to reach potential customers. How are you doing it, and how well are you doing?
 

The Case Study

We’re trying this out for ourselves, seeing what works for growing our business, so we can help others grow theirs. We’ll publish updates on our progress with our case study so anybody interested can follow our progress. Hopefully they’ll contribute some ideas or experience of their own. Here’s our update.

First the background.

Front Office Box is a small business management solution in a very busy market dominated by a company which owns the pay per click dimension. For us Adwords isn’t an option. We have a Ning network, a LinkedIn group, a Facebook Page, a Twitter account and our web site with integrated blog. In terms of traffic we can immediately forget Ning, LinkedIn and Facebook. They don’t do anything for us, at all.

Our Strategy

We definitely do not chase traffic. We publish tightly targeted articles in ourblog and promote them on Twitter. Our objective is getting messages in front of people who have a problem we can solve, and persuading them to register for an on-line account. Everything about the process andcontent is designed to filter out the tyre kickers. It’s much more aboutcontent led selling than Internet Marketing.

During February

we published 15 new articles in the blog, tweeted more than 50 interesting links on Twitter and answered 5 questions at Business Answers. We also had our friends at Implu find interesting contacts on Twitter with their Indux service and ran a banner ad on the Social Implu page. So how did we do?

• Our Twitter followers increased from 3,285 to 4,379 or up 33%
• Total visits to our website/blog was up 9%
• Total page views was up 9%
• Proportion of visits from the USA was up from 42% to 50%
• Visits from a total of 77 countries
• Search results brought 45% of our traffic, to 130 different pages
• Links from our Twitter account brought 20% of our traffic
• Links posted on Twitter brought 3% of our traffic
• The banner ad brought 4% of traffic
• And most important – our new account registrations were up 50%

We Can Improve

We know there are ways we can improve the performance in each of our dimensions and we’ll work on those, particularly with SEO for our blog articles. Some perform well but there’s a lot of room for improvement on most. We’ll also spend more time answering questions in the forums.

Come back next month and see how we’re doing – but don’t wait until then if you have ideas to share. We’re all ears.