A New Generation Marketer

To say that Inbound Marketing by @Hubspot’s founders @BrianHalligan and @Dharmesh was an amazing read would be an understatement. I recently finished college with a Marketing Communications/Advertising major, but this book completely revolutionized my theories of marketing. The authors ask the reader at the beginning of the book to take every outbound marketing theory they learned and disregard it. Now at first this made me regret spending over $130,000 on college tuition, but I realized that my traditional marketing background helps to support the reasoning behind why inbound marketing just makes sense.

Below are the most critical and interesting pieces from the book that everyone should pay attention to:

1. Realize that ten years ago, traditional marketing techniques (i.e. television, radio, magazine advertising) did work very well; especially for companies like GE. However, how people are much better at ‘blocking’ these messages out. This is where inbound marketing comes into play.

2. “It’s not what you say–it’s what others say about you.” People have become more skeptical about what companies say about themselves. It is much better to have customers come looking for you, find your content incredible, and spread the good word.

3. Create a REMARKABLE strategy. Your content strategy must be very unique and highly valuable to your customers. This not only drives them to your site, but increases the chance that they will become a lead and customer. Remarkable content also increases the likelihood that more people will link your site to theirs, which in turn increases your ranking on Google.

4. While traditional marketing methods tested the ‘width of your wallet’, inbound marketing is much different. If done right, you can spend much less money and create an incredible web presence.

5. Create a blog. Blogging is more powerful than ever. If you write about incredible topics that are valuable and relative to your audience’s interests, they will talk about you. Blogging also gives you credibility and increases your visibility on the web.

6. Subscribe to other people’s blogs. By reading what others are saying about your industry, you can reflect on their articles in your own blogs, start a conversation with the others by commenting on their blogs, and therefore you increase your visibility.

7. Get found on Google. You must know which types of keywords are best to be found by Google. If you use a highly common keyword, you will get lost in search results. Start off with less popular but still relevant keywords. Also, focus on the keywords you assign to each page on your website for increased visibility.

8. Recognize the power of inbound links. The more links that are created on other sites to your page, the better ranking you will have in Google. Do not ask others to put your links on their site outright; make sure they value your content and are willing to do so. The more high-power sites that add your link to theirs, the better ranking Google will give you.

9. Get found using social media sites. Create a consistent image of your brand by the look and feel of your pages, pictures, bio, etc. Post valuable and interesting topics on your sites so people will want to engage in conversations with you. Focus on getting found on Digg (even though this is a tricky thing to do), get discovered on StumbleUpon, and be searched for on YouTube

10. Learn how to convert your visitors into leads (make compelling yet simple calls to action and track your progress), convert prospects into leads (use highly effective landing pages, easy to fill out contact forms) and convert leads to customers (figure out what stage in the buying process each customer is in and keep in contact with the lead)

11. Pick the best people to hire for inbound marketing. Hire ‘Digital Citizens’. Digital Citizens are those that have an RSS reader, read blogs, rank high up in Google, use Delicious, write their own blog, use social networks and update them regularly, and post videos on YouTube. Hire those who are very analytical since inbound marketing is all about measurements and data. Hire those with a large web reach. Make sure they have lots of content, have subscribers to their blog, many followers on social networks, etc. Finally, make sure they are content creators. If they create remarkable content that attracts others, they will spread good word about your company as well.

12. Watch your competition. Some of the best CEO’s and leaders tend to be more on-edge about what competition is doing, but this is a good thing.

For more information on Inbound Marketing, Hubspot created their own Inbound Marketing University.

Now, onto reading Steve Garfield’s Get Seen book!