Ex3 Café

Measuring The Results of Your Inbound Marketing

So, you super search optimized your website so people can find you, you're crankin' out blog postings and podcasts like there's no tomorrow and you've subscribed to (and are actively participating in) all of the major social media sites.  Let's face it, you're nothing short of a lean, mean inbound marketing machine.  Now, how do you measure the success of all the time and expense you put into all of this?  To answer this question, check out this presentation from inbound marketing software company Hubspot:

As you can see from the above presentation, there are a number of techniques and tools available (mostly for free) that you can leverage to gauge the success of your inbound marketing initiatives.  The key here, like any other marketing initiative, is to continually monitor your marketing activities and make adjustments as necessary.

One final note.  If you're just starting out with inbound marketing, have a bit of patience, as (I've been told) the more content you publish, the more relevant you'll become and the better the chance you will produce a home run (or at least a base hit) that will increase awareness of your brand and interest in what you have to offer.  That's what I'm banking on anyway. :-)

Adding Inbound Marketing to Your Marketing Bag of Tricks

If you are strictly an outbound marketer and want to add inbound marketing to your marketing mix, this posting provides a high level overview on how to do this.  If you are unfamiliar with the difference between outbound and inbound marketing, read my previous blog posting "Is Outbound Marketing On The Decline?"

Case Studies, White Papers and Videos

Probably the least time consuming and most inexpensive method to add inbound marketing to your marketing mix would be to add case studies, testimonials, white papers or videos to your web site.  This is especially the case if you already have one or all of these marketing items in non digital format, as it's relatively straight forward to convert any of these items to a format that can be posted to your website (i.e .pdf file, flash video...etc.).

It's important to note here... if you decide to post any of the above marketing materials/resources to your website for download, many inbound marketing "purists" would strongly suggest that you not require users to enter their contact information, as this limits the ability for people to share your content with others.  Here you have to balance the value of capturing the lead versus the value of (potentially) having your content distributed to a larger audience through viral distribution.  Tough choice here for you traditional outbound marketers.  I know. :-)

Blogs

Creating a blog is an excellent way to create a bi-directional dialog between you and your customers/prospects.  Plus the content in your blog is picked up by search engine "crawlers," thus increasing the ranking of your website on search results pages.  There are many inexpensive (or free), web-based blogging tools to choose from.  Some of the best known blogging sites today include:  Wordpress (www.wordpress.com), Typepad (www.typepad.com) or Blogger (www.blogger.com).  I happen to use Typepad, but I suggest using a blogging site that best first your needs.  The potential downside of blogging is you have to put in the time to keep the content fresh otherwise your subscribers lose interest in your blog (and hence stop coming to and sharing your blog content) and your search engine rankings start to go down.

Podcasts

If you're one that has the "gift of gab" and/or you're a closet talk show host, the podcast format may be just the medium for you.  A podcast is an excellent way for you to broadcast your message to a wide audience (in a portable, audio and/or audio-video format) and it enables you to host interviews with experts in your particular field (which is an especially big draw for subscribers).  Like with blogging, there are a number of inexpensive (or free) podcasting tools on the web to create, edit, publish and promote your podcast.  Some popular podcasting sites and products include:  Podbean (www.podbean.com), Apple's Garage Band (http://www.apple.com/support/garageband/podcasts/) and Podcasting Tools (http://www.podcasting-tools.com).  There's even a website you can go to, to have professionally recorded podcast intros and "outros" (www.audiobag.com).  Like a blog though, a podcast takes a certain amount of time commitment to keep fresh and up-to-date (which is necessary for the blog to be a viable inbound marketing channel).

Adding Viral Marketing Tools to Your Website

This involves adding functionality to your website that enables customers and prospects to "spread the word" about your company, and associated offerings, to others.  For example, you could provide a link on your website that enables visitors to promote your company on their favorite social networking site or blog.  Even better, you could create links on each of your product pages that would enable visitors to point others to specific products/services on your site.  In addition to adding "share" links to your site, you could also enable visitors to refer your company (or specific product/service) to others via e-mail.  In this case, you would simply provide a simple form on your website homepage (or product specific page) that a visitor could enter email addresses into, to refer your company to others.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization involves editing your website content and HTML coding in order to increase your websites rankings on search results pages.  If you have the technical ability (and the time), there are a number of resources on the web that you can refer to, to optimize your website search rankings yourself.  Or, if you prefer to outsource this type of work, there are a plethora of consultants that can perform this type of work for you.

Now that you know how to add inbound marketing to your marketing mix, stay tuned for my next blog posting which describes how to measure the success of inbound marketing.

Is Outbound Marketing On The Decline?

I've been asking myself this question a lot lately due to the increasing popularity and buzz around inbound marketing.  And, truth be told, I've also been asking myself this question because the majority of the consulting work I do focuses on enabling marketers to design and execute outbound marketing campaigns more effectively and efficiently.  With this provocative question in mind, let me first define what outbound and inbound marketing is.

What is Outbound and Inbound Marketing?

Outbound Marketing refers to more traditional marketing methods that actively engage a target market such as direct mail, e-mail, phone, advertising and other marketing vehicles.

Inbound Marketing focuses on getting potential customers to "discover" your business by creating and publishing content that they want to see and perhaps even share with friends.  Examples of inbound marketing include: search engine optimization, blog/website content publishing and viral marketing enablement.  In a nut shell, inbound marketing focuses on:

• Creating and publishing content that "draws people in" to learn more about your company and its offerings
• Providing the tools for people to recommend your companies products or services (i.e. providing links on your product pages that visiters can post to their social networking sites)

Interestingly, as I was researching the Internet for the above definitions, I was reminded of push and pull marketing.  I remember these terms from marketing courses that I took in college (in the early 90's).  That said, I'm wondering if the terms "outbound" and "inbound" marketing are conceptually the same as "push" and "pull" marketing, but simply have different names and reflect the newer marketing channels and techniques leveraged today.  Perhaps I can have someone on my upcoming podcast (coming soon) to answer this question.

What's the Research Say?

In my anecdotal research to find out whether outbound marketing is on the decline, I went to the Internet (essentially Google and Yahoo searches) and I posed this question to numerous marketing professionals.  In short, the answers I got ranged from "Outbound marketing is on its way to extinction" to "Outbound marketing is absolutely not on the decline" and everything in between.  That said, the research I performed didn't really tell me definitively (one way or the other) whether outbound marketing is on its way out.

Note:  Not surprisingly, my research uncovered that many of the strong proponents of inbound marketing were individuals and companies that sell products and services related to inbound marketing (and vice versa).

So, What Do I Think?

What I think can be summed up as follows:

• Acquisition oriented outbound marketing to unsuspecting audiences (i.e. the "carpet-bomb approach") is on the decline because the cost for this type of marketing is increasing and people have too many marketing interruptions today to process yet another mass marketing message.  Plus, there are too many other (more effective) acquisition marketing alternatives in the marketplace today to have to resort to the "pay and spray" method of marketing.
• Permission based, outbound marketing to existing opt-in customers and prospects isn't going away anytime soon, as it's a proven method to effectively convert prospects into customers and increase business with existing customers.  A portion of outbound (optin) marketing budgets may shift to inbound marketing initiatives though, but I don't believe that outbound marketing budgets will evaporate all together.  In fact, a friend of mine started an e-commerce business a few years ago leveraging (only) inbound marketing channels to initially promote his business.  Now that he has a reasonably large customer database of optin customers (with profile and purchase information) he is leveraging outbound marketing to help increase business with existing customers.
• Smart marketers will add inbound marketing options to their marketing tool kit
• Really smart marketers will figure out how to integrate inbound and outbound marketing into their overall marketing strategy
• With the recent explosion of search marketing, blogs, social networking...etc., inbound marketing is the latest buzz.  That said, I believe we need to let the hype and buzz die down a bit before we can make any definitive statements about the future of inbound and outbound marketing.
• It will be interesting to read this posting 10 years from now to see if any of my predictions are correct!

That's what I think.  What do you think?

Note: A special thanks to the following sources that I referenced for this posting:

• Hubspot for their blog post on Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing
• DoshDash for their blog post on Push Marketing V.S. Pull Marketing