Why Change Selling Blog

Inbound Marketing is the future of marketing and the marketing and PR industry is rapidly transitioning from the old World of outbound interrupt marketing to inbound or permission marketing as it is also known.

Inbound marketing works and has been proved in thousands of instances to lower the cost of marketing and to create a content legacy that keeps on generating mind-share, traffic and leads for both very small and very large companies.

We can now assign rules for the execution of a new inbound marketing project to ensure the likelihood of a positive outcome and rapid return on the investment.

The purpose of this article is to highlight the effort required to be successful with Inbound Marketing, not to lay out the rules for inbound marketing success, that is another article.

I have excerpted a passage (in italics) from a recent article, Inbound Marketing Benefits by the Numbers, by John McTigue at Kuno Creative to identify the effort and costs of inbound marketing success.

I spoke with a prospective client this week in the marketing services business and after a brief introduction she expressed her frustration, "We’re doing all this marketing 2.0 stuff, but we're not getting in the door".
Prior to the call I ran a Marketing Grader report and her Website scored above 65% in all three areas of all sites graded for Inbound Marketing potential by HubSpot's Marketing Grader.
The crux of the problem is that you can be doing all this Marketing 2.0 stuff and still failing if you're off target in your messaging and out of sync. with market and using sub-optimal practices.
In this case, the marketing services business is transforming rapidly from the old interrupt driven model of push-marketing, advertising and PR placement, to the opt-in, inbound marketing model of content creation, social networking and community building, underpinned by analysis and testing.

The issues that surfaced during our conversation are common symptoms of the structural change in this sector and they are summarized below;–

Most of the readers of this blog will agree that Inbound Marketing or Internet Marketing is the future of marketing; but it's a journey, not a one-off event and there is no final destination, because the foundation technology and tools are constantly evolving and the horizon as to what is achievable is ever-expanding.

#Inbound12

I’m here in Boston for #Inbound12, with 2800 HubSpotters, customers and partners at the World’s largest gathering of Inbound Marketers, for 3 days of meetings, presentations, tutorials and networking with the HubSpot community.

I'm speaking with Stephanie Tilton, marketer, writer, blogger and expert on generating inbound traffic based on the words you write in blogs, E-Books and White papers. I'm showing Stephanie in real-time how easy it is to create a blog-post on Hubspot's Inbound Marketing platform and I'm getting some free advice on writing white papers.....I hope this is of interest to you.

Using Inbound Marketing to realize the full potential of your sales team

White Paper Executive Summary

Anyone who has been part of a Business-to-Business (B2B)

The symptoms of marketing under-achievement are fairly standard and there are tens of thousands of companies Worldwide with good to great products that are under-performing in marketing. Here are a few symptoms of a problem at B2B company, Acme Inc.:

Chances are you didn’t arrive here by accident; you followed a link from either a search engine or a Blog or links from a social network site…welcome to inbound marketing. 

December 2013 marked the end of our 5th year as HubSpot customers and 4th year as HubSpot partners.  

You can read prior reviews here:
HubSpot Review Year 1
HubSpot Review Year 2
HubSpot Review Year 3 
HubSpot Review Year 4

I realize now that we were very early adopters of an important new paradigm in marketing and one from which there is no turning back, once the journey is begun.
 
2013 marked the year that inbound marketing “crossed-the-chasm” from the realm of the early adopter into the early majority in the cycle of adoption of discontinuous technology.
 
HubSpot, in 2008 had a few hundred customers and the product compared to today was crude and limited in function.

It was basic and unsophisticated, but perfectly functional for content creation and inbound marketing as it was then.  

Today HubSpot is a company of more than 400 employees, 10,000+ customers and more than 1000 partners. The product is unrecognizable from its early beginnings and leads the industry in functionality and usability.
 
In short, the product is a complete integrated tool-set for inbound marketing, which if used in conjunction with the HubSpot methodology will produce predictable and measurable results, a high ROI and a content legacy that will produce traffic and leads for years to come. 

There are no short-cuts to inbound marketing success. The product and the methodology works as advertised. The results are tangible, progress is visible – or otherwise.  

The chart shows our traffic and leads and sources for the past 5 years.

In May 2013, I began a marketing consulting with a sales and marketing messaging alignment project WittyParrot, an exciting new Bay Area technology company. You can download my new eBook Sales and Marketing Alignment, Content Capture and Reuse which is a result of that engagement on their new website; one of the first on the new Enterprise Hubspot COS, which went live in late October.

Most of my effort is now going into WittyParrot in the role of VP Marketing, which explains the drop in traffic on Admarco.

The first 100 days with WittyParrot have been astonishing and I will write about that in a different article.