What’s all the buzz about Inbound Marketing?

Rand and I just gave a very well-attended webinar to the Cornell Entrepreneur Network titled, “The Birth of Customer 2.0 and the Death of Marketing as we know it”. One of the primary trends we discussed is the emergence of Inbound Marketing – and given the tremendous interest, I wanted to talk a bit more about it here on our blog.

It is clear to all of us that online marketing and social media have dramatically changed the marketing practice over the past decade. They have certainly made it a lot more measurable and accountable – much more of a science. They have also made it a lot more interactive and collaborative with the target customer.

Yet it is important to note that some of the marketing fundamentals haven’t changed. Marketing has always been and continues to be about knowing our audience so we can target them with relevant messages that will resonate. Of course the best way to resonate with our audience – really in any situation – is by listening to them before talking. So the fundamental approach to marketing hasn’t changed but how we do it, the tools we employ and how we define and measure success certainly has…

Traditional – or as it is coming to be known as “Outbound Marketing” – focuses on finding customers by building brand awareness and demand through PR, online and offline advertising as well as direct mail and email promotions. It is the company reaching out to the customer – presumably with a compelling message or offer – to entice them to buy their products and services.

Inbound Marketing is a new approach to marketing that optimizes getting found by customers. It is about attracting customers to the business…Whether through search engine optimization (SEO), paid search, social media, or relevant cross-linking, Inbound Marketing is focused on helping businesses improve website “findability” for qualified buyers. The bonus is Inbound Marketing also benefits the visitor with improved content relevancy and linked resources.

What’s important to note about outbound marketing is that it is “interrupt-driven”. What I mean by that is, just like that a TV or pop-up web ad, we interrupt whatever the customer (both B2B and B2C) may be doing with a “message from the sponsor”. Even email is interrupt driven.

So to put it simply, with Inbound Marketing, marketers “earn their way in” vs. “buy, beg or bug their way in”!
One of the biggest problems with outbound marketing – besides the interruption factor – is that it has to rise above the noise to be effective…and the amount of noise is growing exponentially. There are too many ads, too many email offers, too many websites, simply too much content out there – and of course that’s further complicated by less and less time and attention on the part of the buyer.

In an earlier post, I described Customer 2.0 as NOT wanting to be “sold to”…as being informed about products and services not from the vendor’s messaging but from peer to peer conversations. Hence interrupt driven marketing is NOT effective with Customer 2.0. They want to find the right products and services themselves. But given the increasing noise level I just described, rising above it and being “findable” isn’t easy.

The KEY to findability is relevance. It is back to those marketing fundamentals I described earlier, since relevance comes from a deeper understanding of customer behavior and sentiment…it comes from listening before shouting out our outbound marketing messages.

Perhaps not too surprisingly, Inbound Marketing comes with another bonus: unlike its program $$ heavy counterpart, it is people (that is time and effort) heavy. It is about generating the right content in the right places, building and fostering user communities for productive engagement to enable the right people – qualified prospects – to FIND us. Sounds interesting? Stay tuned for more discussion on innovative approaches and emerging best practices in a future post…

Filed under: demand generation, Inbound Marketing, marketing analytics, Social Media Monitoring | Tags: customer 2.0, Inbound Marketing

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