Colin Alsheimer » inbound marketing

Five Principles of Inbound Marketing Presentation

Colin — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 16:52:34 +0000

I was slated to give this presentation to a group of communications faculty at TCU on Feb. 12th, but the great snowpocalypse of 2010 put a kink in those plans. The presentation covered an Inbound Marketing 101 style curriculum, plus went over a few simple strategies for teaching Inbound Marketing to students. Since I didn’t get a chance to give the presentation, I uploaded it to Slideshare.net, and lo and behold, I wake up to an e-mail this morning that the presentation was being featured on the homepage.

So, in its entirety, here is the presentation, Five Principles of Inbound Marketing & Four Simple Strategies for Teaching It

Five Principles of Inbound Markeing, and Four Simple Strategies for Teaching It

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The 5 Principles of Inbound Marketing

Colin — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:00:23 +0000

The concept of Inbound Marketing as a defined tactic is still very new. Here is my take on the principles of an effective Inbound Marketing campaign. Feel free to chip in with your observations at the end of the post!

Listen and learn

Listening and learning are two of the fundamental skills one must develop in order to engage in effective Inbound Marketing. By listening to your community you’ll not only learn about your customers (and what they think of your products), but you’ll gain valuable insight into how to create better products and services for them.

By engaging in intelligent listening before participating in communities, you’ll also ensure that you don’t make any “newbie” mistakes, which can anger and alienate the very people you want to connect with.

Create exceptional content

The only way to have true success with Inbound Marketing is to create and share exceptional content. Since Inbound Marketing is about being found by your target customers, it’s important to make sure there are ample ways for a customer to find you online. This means that besides your corporate website, you need to be blogging, creating rich media like video and podcasts, and actively participating in social media channels.

Use the right online marketing mix

Inbound Marketing, as it’s defined so far, is really an umbrella term which combines Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing. It will be important to use the right mix of these two tactics (and others) to have the best effect. If more people in your target market use the web for search, you might want to invest more money in SEO than social media.

Engage with your customers

You can listen and learn, create great content and use the right mix all you want, but you’ll get nowhere if you’re not engaging with your customers. You need to be creating the type of content that encourages discussion, or is useful to your customer in some way. As Chris Brogan often says – “Be there before the sale.”

How can you engage? Listen and respond to people talking about your brand or product, be helpful by answering industry related questions, comment on other people’s blogs, and consistently promote others.

Analyze and measure

How can you know what’s working if you’re not analyzing and measuring the results? One of the hallmarks of any good Inbound Marketing campaign is that the execution be tied to measurable results. Before you begin the campaign, figure out some goals you want to accomplish. Contact form submissions, e-commerce sales, brand perception, and engagement metrics like page views, time on site, and comments are all good places to start. Then, using a tool like Google Analytics, configure your goal pages.

What else is essential to an Inbound Marketing campaign? What advice would you give to someone just starting to think about using Inbound Marketing tactics?

How HubSpot Created an Industry: The Ultimate Inbound Marketing Case Study

Colin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:00:56 +0000

Founded in June of 2006 by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot is a company that has seemingly taken the Internet by storm, racking up top ranked blogs, twitter accounts, viral videos, and millions in venture funding along the way.

The Ultimate Case Study

In the Inbound Marketing space everyone is looking out for the next great case study. Pioneers like Dell and Zappos are brought up anytime a marketer needs to show a client that inbound marketing strategies do in fact work.

But could we be missing the biggest case study of them all?

HubSpot, the company that owns the term Inbound Marketing, got to the top by associating themselves with a phrase that up until 2006-2008, had mostly been used in an entirely different context (typically referring to a form of market research).

In the process, HubSpot has created measurable demand for a classification of marketing that never existed before, while at the same time, flooding the Internet with relevant content for an (at the time) uncompetitive market.

How did they do it?

“All we try to do is build things we think people will like – both software like HubSpot and the free marketing tools at Grader.com and other things like our blog articles, Webinars, videos, and HubSpot TV – and then share these things with people and ask them what they think.” – Mike Volpe, VP of Marketing for HubSpot in a 2009 ZDNet inteview.

The HubSpot team is frequently known to mention that the secret to their success is “eating their own dog food”, and HubSpot must be full.

In the course of their marketing, HubSpot has created:

A suite of popular, free analytics & benchmarking tools (grader.com)
A top ranked marketing blog (#29 on AdAge’s Power 150)
A series of popular YouTube videos yielding over a quarter of a million views

They’ve also been instrumental in pushing the term “Inbound Marketing” by:

Sponsoring the Inbound Marketing Summit, featuring many of the top minds in the Social Media and SEO industries.
Creating the Inbound Marketing University, a resource and education site that’s very subtly branded as being run by HubSpot.
Creating a series of music video spoofs which extol the virtues and process for successful Inbound Marketing
Publishing the first Inbound Marketing book (affiliate)

Notice in the charts below, the growth in search demand for the term “Inbound Marketing” has a strong correlation with the growth of HubSpot’s business.

Inbound Marketing Search Growth

HubSpot's Explosive Growth

Wrapping Up

HubSpot has managed to grow a successful company by promoting and branding a set of marketing tactics that had previously been classified as two separate entities. They’ve created a self-fulfilling marketing machine: they generate demand for a marketing strategy they created, which builds interest in the services they alone can provide.

Do you think the Inbound Marketing term is here to stay? Or is Inbound Marketing itself too narrow to cover the full scope of the Internet marketing activities that must be conducted for a successful online campaign? Further, has HubSpot built the foundation for long term success by pushing the idea of Inbound Marketing?