Social Media to Increase the Importance of Inbound Marketing
With the explosion of social media, the direction marketing flows is shifting from outbound to inbound. After all, with the ability of a company to have an infinite number of "findable" touch points in every corner of the internet, spending the bulk of marketing dollars on traditional outbound push marketing makes less and less sense.
As this shift continues, the practice of inbound marketing becomes ever more important. So what is inbound marketing? According to inbound marketing company HubSpot, it's a combination of "getting found" through SEO, blogging and social media; conversion through landing pages, lead tracking and lead management and analysis through marketing analytics, competitive analytics and lead scoring.
In a HubSpot case study video, HubSpot Partner PR 2020's Paul Roetzer explains how his company works with HubSpot and how inbound marketing is changing the PR industry.
It's not that inbound marketing is new. It's been around forever but it's always been relegated to back room status. As the usage of media continues to shift from push to pull, inbound marketing will occupy an increasingly larger slice of the marketing pie.
UPDATE: This just in!! Congratulations to HubSpot's Rebecca Corliss on her NEDMA Gold B2B Video Award for You Oughta Know Inbound Marketing.
Comments
Paul has been a very valuable partner at HubSpot. He is the "services" ying to our "software" yang.
We think he's way ahead of the curve, where most PR companies are tweaking copy for pop's sake, he's tweaking strategy to generate more business for his clients.
After all the outbound marketing (email campaigns, cold calls from operators) it is time companies embrace social media.
Thus inbound marketing is here to rule.
Problem:
Website visitors don't tell who they are.
Only 2 to 3% will ever contact you or register for a white paper download or a podcast.
Solution:
A web service that reveals the company names of your visitors and their interest.
Like LEADSExplorer
@Engago.
Anonymous visitor tracking is a good idea too for improving cold calling hit rates.
But, a well optimized site and strong inbound marketing program should generate 10-20% conversion rates.
Hopefully this is not a repeat of my earlier comment that didn't seem to post.
It seems to me that marketers are still viewing social media as if it's akin to a TV channel and by doing so they are missing out on the opportunity to embrace the Social Web. "Joining the conversation" is becoming a worn out phrase these days as it should be second nature by now. When anyone opens up a browser, checks their G Mail, Twitter or Facebook accounts they are participating in the Social Web and reaching them with messages will become harder and harder. It is no longer about SEO and SEM - at a panel at Nemo last week, Tony Welch of HP stunned the audience when he claimed that "SEO and SEM will be dead as you know it in 6 months." Here's the full account SEO and SEM will be dead.
As he points out - "Sure your company's website might continue to secure the #1 spot on Google - but what happens when the #2 result is a negative video on YouTube that has 500,000 page views? The question I have is, what do the SEO folks tell their clients when that happens?"
These day the important metrics in online campaigns point toward Reputation Management and what I call Experiential Awareness. In other words it's about what people are saying to others about brands online not where they rank in indexing.
As Tony points out - "You may ask yourself why Google has decided to add more weight to the social web. The answer in my opinion is that they realize that when a viral event is happening, people aren't using Google to find out about it. Instead they turn to the searches on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube. Now that Twitter has enabled real time search, it is a force to be reckoned with."
Understanding what people are saying about a brand online is more important than turning cold leads into sales through "getting found" via SEO. If Google believes in experiential awareness then I feel that we are on to something.