What Does ABC Mean To Modern Day Small Business?

There are several movies that I often pull clips of and send to our team to get a good chuckle out of them since they pertain to angry people in the business world. Wall Street, Glengarry Glen and Ross, Office Space, Boiler Room, the list goes on and on. The line that always stood out was how they would yell what ABC stands for – "Always Be Closing!" Being submerged in small business bookkeeping and marketing for almost a decade now, I come to realize ABC means much more than that. Instead of always try to close; you should always try to compel, Always Be Compelling! Inbound and content marketing are the two main areas that really drives this idea.

Be A Thought Leader, Not an A-hole

Salesman that go door to door, cold call, etc. are usually overly salesy and are trying to hit some crazy quota based on a super low close rate. Imagine working your butt off on trying to close 2% or less of the people you get on the phone? It would suck. Plus, they usually have no regard for the customer’s well being or long term health or growth. They can be pushy, not want to take no for an answer, and have tactics to handle your every move so you end up buying from them just to be left alone. In comes content and inbound marketing.

Using these modern day marketing methods perfected by certain industry leaders, such as Hubspot, the consumer isn’t being hit up left and right to buy, buy, buy. It makes sense to properly position your business to be in place for when the consumer, customer, client is ready to buy.  They are not only ready to buy, they are compelled to buy. It becomes a no brainer for them since they were able to proceed at a pace they are comfortable with. As far as conversions go and all that jazz, they practically close themselves since they are the ones initiating the face to face (or email to email) relationship because they know your company, trust your company, and want to take the next step based on what they have learned about your company over their given research period.

What Drives This?

Putting out original, relevant, timely content that speaks to your potential client base will gain traction over time. Time is the key word here, nothing happens overnight. If you want something to happen overnight go throw a few thousand dollars at Google Adwords or PPC and see a bounce rate that really bounces all over the place, hoping that something sticks. If your business is hoping to be around for a while it would make sense to slow down, do some marketing research, internal discovery, write content, build a modern day website that is capable of handling inbound marketing, and pursue the direction that is relevant and meaningful to your business. Every business is different. For instance, a non-profit may be way more successful with Facebook posts while an accounting firm would be more so on LinkedIn, or vice versa. You won’t know until you dive in and give it a try and do some beta testing.

Being on top of your own content and being genuine will do nothing but help your business’s marketing campaign or overall goals. Imagine having your website lose searchability when Google releases a new algorithm such as Penguin 2.1 (like way back in October 2013) because of poor link building tactics, spammy articles, pop ups, etc. while a small competitor that is pounding away fresh content leap frogs you and rises to the top of Google’s FPP. It has happened and will continue to happen. We’ve learned a ton over the past years. Is your business ready to learn?