What is Inbound Marketing?
I along with all of my peers, have been interrupting people with our carefully crafted messages. Very well crafted messages. So well crafted that it was hard to tell we were even “marketing.” We use research to identify everything – who cares about the product, how they prefer to get their information, what messages best resonate with them in terms of what we are peddling. We marry it all with eye-catching graphics, grounded in psychological technique, and launch. Twenty years of “interruptive” marketing. “Outbound” marketing. “Push” marketing. Twenty years of interrupting people with our messages, pushing our message on them, and doing it exceedingly well. Sometimes, our customers did not even notice.
Outdated Technology
As it turns out, while many of us older marketers have been simply aging, it seems that our more youthful colleagues have been quietly building the most specific and highly efficient marketing platform the world has ever seen. It’s called the internet. “Web 2.0″ to be exact. I’m not talking about mere web sites where you can buy stuff or search engine optimization alone, either – I am talking about interacting with the market like never before. I am talking about enabling your customers to find you as opposed to you finding them. It smacks my 20 years of “interruptive” marketing right in the face.
Oh yes, it is a whole new world. And if you care about building your business, you better get on board as fast as you can. I strongly recommend you go visit Hubspot and engage this cool, innovative and very smart company to help you learn about what you’ve been missing.
I consider myself a marketing expert and I have helped three companies build company websites, but I had no idea how deep the internet could go until just recently. It turns out that I knew nothing about marketing using this all new and very opposite approach.
So what is this inbound marketing all about?
It’s about building your company’s presence on the web in such a way that people who want what you sell can find it easily, research it, and choose to buy it from you based on what they find. And let me tell you, it’s an all new world.
Instead of reading and heeding your marketing material, buyers are far more likely to read what others have said about your product and base their decisions on those comments more than your marketing material. Get used to it. And the techniques used today are incredible. Tweeting and blogging, posting on Facebook and LinkedIn, linking into client sites and getting others to link into yours – these are all just small parts of a larger puzzle.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you have three choices – a) start to learn it, b) hire someone who knows it, or c) ignore it.
If you choose “c”, good luck. And don’t bother to call me when you need help setting the clock on your VCR.
Photo: Listener42 on flickr
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