Many of the best knowledge-based businesses are small regional firms. Here's a typical scenario: a top-performer at a global professional services firm gets the entrepreneurial bug. She's built a businesses within the global business and doesn't see why she can't do it on her own. She opens her business and grows rapidly by providing an excellent customer experience to SMB companies that don't get the same attention from the big boys.

Think about your region. How many of the top insurance brokers, accountants, financial advisors and management consultants are regionally based? I live in the Washington, DC metropolitan area and there are tons of great companies in those industries. They dominate the SMB market here in DC.

Let's take it one step further. That same regional business has grown through the owner's connections and through referrals from satisfied customers. They look to the future and ask themselves, "How can I keep growing to provide opportunities for my people?"

Many of them look to match their sales processes with the modern buying process. One statistic I keep coming back to in this blog is that the typical buyer completes 57% of his buying process before ever contacting a salesperson. Buyers in an active buying process use search engine queries, read blogs and research companies through social media to narrow down the list of vendors who can meet their needs.

This is a godsend for knowledge-based businesses. With content marketing, they can share their expertise and demonstrate to buyers conducting research that they understand their problems and have some good ideas to solve them. This gets you in the game while that buyer is in the first 57% of his buying process. Your blogs, videos, eBooks and webinars are part of your sales team.

The inbound marketing growth conundrum

To continue with our scenario, the professional services business owner implements an inbound marketing program. They start generating leads with their blog, eBooks, videos and webinars. Then something unexpected happens. The DC-based business starts getting leads from California, Colorado and Pennsylvania. They contine with their inbound lead generation and things get even more interesting. They get leads from Canada, Russia and Colombia. What do do?

Can your business expand into new markets?

The first question to ask is whether it's feasible to work outside your geographic base. There are several things to consider in answering that question.

1. Can you service the potential customer logistically? Your answer may be different than it was ten years ago. With communication platforms like Skype, Go To Meeting and Join.me, you can have real-time meetings with remote customers. Other cloud-based software platforms make it feasible to work with remote customers by sharing work files, project management information and creative content. There's no substitute for the human touch - if you decide to work with a remote customer, it's probably a good idea to build in travel expenses to your business model to have face-to-face meetings on a periodic basis with your customer.
2. Are you properly licensed to service the remote customer? In my years as an insurance broker, I had many customers that were outside of my geographic region. In the insurance brokerage field, it's relatively easy to obtain a non-resident license in most states. There are reciprocal arrangements for continuing education that make it relatively easy to maintain licenses throughout the country. Attorneys, financial services professionals and others all have various licensing requirements. Make sure you are properly licensed in all the jurisdictions in which you do business.
3. Do you have relationships with local providers that can assist you in servicing the client? Many regional businesses belong to associations of like-minded businesses throughout the country. Reciprocal arrangements like this can help in adding the local touch to your service delivery.
4. Is there a business case for opening an office outside your region to service business opportunities that arise from your inbound marketing? Earlier in my career, I helped open and run an office in Seattle for my DC-based company. One of the key elements to successfully opening that office was to hire a dynamic local employee who knew how to navigate treacherous waters. 15 years later, that office is still open and that dynamic local employee is still running it.

How do you adjust your marketing if you don't want to expand?

Many businesses will decide that they don't want to expand outside of their home area. Here are a few inbound marketing strategies for those businesses.

1. Optimize your inbound marketing for your locale. Make sure to register with Google Places, Bing Places for Business and Yahoo Local. If appropriate, sign up for review services like Yelp. Use geographic tags in your on-page SEO. When done properly, local search engine optimization can get your business front and center with local searchers.
2. Use Geo-Targeting in search engine and social media advertising. It takes time for your inbound marketing efforts to produce results organically. It takes time for search engines to index your website and to "crawl" the site frequently enough to see that you are consistently producing good content. To give a boost to organic results, many firms use social meda and search engine advertising. Depending on what you do, I recommend using social media advertising on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to put your content in front of potential buyers. All of these platforms (and search engine advertising platforms) let you target your advertising geographically.
   
3. Decide what to do with leads outside of your service area. If you belong to an association, see if you can work out a revenue-sharing agreement with local providers for your leads. You may choose to ignore some of them, it's just the nature of the internet that you're going to get unqualified leads.
4. Ask your local vendors, partners and colleagues to share your content through their social media networks. Many of them will have potential buyers in your region and their content shares will help you reach them. Remember that it's a two-way street - help those that help you.

Summary

While it's always preferable to have qualified leads, the nature of the internet is such that you will generate leads that probably won't buy from you. By targeting your content to appeal to the people that typically buy from you, you will reduce the number of unqualified leads.

Inbound marketing often presents a growth conundrum to regional professional services businesses: do I expand geographically or not? If the answer is yes, think it though to make sure to do it wisely. If not, use geo-targeting to maximize local leads and decide how you will deal with leads outside of your home base. In any event, having too many leads is a good problem to have.