The document discusses the importance of inbound marketing strategies over outbound strategies. It shows that inbound approaches like creating valuable content and distributing it widely can increase awareness, conversions, and revenue more effectively than outbound tactics like cold calling and interruptive ads. Specific metrics and examples are provided that demonstrate how content marketing helped HubSpot increase website traffic, leads, and conversions without relying on spam or interruption. The overall message is that marketers need to shift their focus to inbound strategies that provide value to potential customers through helpful, relevant content.
8. #GrowWithHubSpot
From: phil123@gmail.com
Date: Sun, Apr 17, 2016 at 1:26 PM
Subject: www.hubspot.com
Hi,
My name is Olivia and I am an Online Strategist. I’ve been tracking the success of your website while doing some
research on your industry—I’m impressed with your company, but there are some real opportunities for growth
that you currently are missing.
Are you interested in several proven strategies to use content and social media to drive relevant traffic to your
site? In 20 minutes I can show you how to fuel your brand and generate more revenue from search engines
and social networks.
This is a real value which comes free of charge.
I’d like to follow up about this with a quick phone call. Can I call you this week to discuss your campaign?
Thank you
Best regards,
Phil
Sr. Web-Developer
From: phil123@gmail.com
Date: Sun, Apr 17, 2016 at 1:26 PM
Subject: www.hubspot.com
Hi,
My name is Olivia and I am an Online Strategist. I’ve been tracking the success of your website while doing some
research on your industry—I’m impressed with your company, but there are some real opportunities for growth
that you currently are missing.
Are you interested in several proven strategies to use content and social media to drive relevant traffic to your
site? In 20 minutes I can show you how to fuel your brand and generate more revenue from search engines
and social networks.
This is a real value which comes free of charge.
I’d like to follow up about this with a quick phone call. Can I call you this week to discuss your campaign?
Thank you
Best regards,
Phil
Sr. Web-Developer
From: phil123@gmail.com
Date: Sun, Apr 17, 2016 at 1:26 PM
Subject: www.hubspot.com
Hi,
My name is Olivia and I am an Online Strategist. I’ve been tracking the success of your website while doing some
research on your industry—I’m impressed with your company, but there are some real opportunities for growth
that you currently are missing.
Are you interested in several proven strategies to use content and social media to drive relevant traffic to your
site? In 20 minutes I can show you how to fuel your brand and generate more revenue from search engines
and social networks.
This is a real value which comes free of charge.
I’d like to follow up about this with a quick phone call. Can I call you this week to discuss your campaign?
Thank you
Best regards,
Phil
Sr. Web-Developer
From: phil123@gmail.com
Date: Sun, Apr 17, 2016 at 1:26 PM
Subject: www.hubspot.com
Hi,
My name is Olivia and I am an Online Strategist. I’ve been tracking the success of your website while doing some
research on your industry—I’m impressed with your company, but there are some real opportunities for growth
that you currently are missing.
Are you interested in several proven strategies to use content and social media to drive relevant traffic to
your site? In 20 minutes I can show you how to fuel your brand and generate more revenue from search engines
and social networks.
This is a real value which comes free of charge.
I’d like to follow up about this with a quick phone call. Can I call you this week to discuss your campaign?
Thank you
Best regards,
Phil
Sr. Web-Developer
From: phil123@gmail.com
Date: Sun, Apr 17, 2016 at 1:26 PM
Subject: www.hubspot.com
Hi,
My name is Olivia and I am an Online Strategist. I’ve been tracking the success of your website while doing some
research on your industry—I’m impressed with your company, but there are some real opportunities for growth
that you currently are missing.
Are you interested in several proven strategies to use content and social media to drive relevant traffic to
your site? In 20 minutes I can show you how to fuel your brand and generate more revenue from search engines
and social networks.
This is a real value which comes free of charge.
I’d like to follow up about this with a quick phone call. Can I call you this week to discuss your campaign?
Thank you
Best regards,
Phil
Sr. Web-Developer
16. #GrowWithHubSpot
Because 61% of consumers
say they feel better about a
company that delivers custom
content, they are also more
likely to buy from that company.
Trust is so important to me as a marketer. Why? Trust is important to any relationship, even the one between a brand and a consumer. People buy from brands and people they trust. People love brands they trust.
Well I was curious about the relationship between trust and marketers and sales professionals. So we went out and did some research.
Of course, you might expect firefighters, teachers and doctors to be at the top of the list.
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But look how far down marketers fall. People trust politicians, lawyers, and even their local baristas more than they trust us.
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As someone who chose marketing as a profession, this was pretty staggering. We are at the absolute bottom of the list.
Why don’t people trust us?
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Well, it’s because we do some pretty awful things.
We interrupt people. How many of you have gone to forbes.com and been annoyed by this pop up? This has to be the most hated ad on the internet.
And then in order for them to get past the interruptive ad, we use snarky and passive aggressive statements like this one - “No, thanks I like my marketing poopy.” Or how many of you have seen things advertising health and cosmetic products with lines like “No thanks, I don’t need healthy skin”.
And we don’t listen. We continue to batch and blast emails out to the same people, with the same message, even if they don’t show interest in our products.
This is a real example from Susannah, one of our marketers. They are clearly automating this email every 7 days. What makes them think she’ll care more about this 7 days later?
Clearly she is not interested in whatever John is selling here.
And sometimes we don’t arm our sales teams with the right information and they send baffling emails like this. This is another real example.
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There’s no personalization here, they’ve just said “hi”.
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Then the person introduces themselves as Olivia, an online strategist.
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Olivia clearly doesn’t know what we do at HubSpot because she wants to offer me a strategy to utilize content to drive more traffic to my website. (Spoiler alert - that’s something we are going to talk about today!)
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And then… I love this part. She’s now Phil and she’s a Senior Web Developer!
If this wasn’t enough, here’s just one more example for you. In 1993, there was a proposal to build a giant advertising billboard in outer space that would appear roughly the same size and brightness as the moon. The project didn’t meet funding and actually inspired a bill to ban any advertisement in outer space.
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Wow, we’ve been banned from space. Our government can’t agree on much but they came together to agree on this. What other profession has been banned from space?
Instead of trying to improve on bad tactics, we’ve automated them. We’ve created crazy, robotic and ineffective workflows like this. Maybe this is what John Bianchi was using?
We have churned through 100s, 1000s of tactics, but never fixed what actually needed fixing, which is that our marketing needed to be designed for humans.
Why do we do these evil things?
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Is it because we’re bad, awful, evil people?
Well, no. It’s because sometimes, it works. Sure, 1% of cold calls work.
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But you know what? The other 99% hate your guts!
Alright, but let’s say you don’t care about people and you don’t care how much they love you. You’re a business after all, and you’re here to make money right?
Well even then, you need new tactics.
Sales go up - ALOT - when web experiences are personalized.
Relevant emails drive more revenue than broadcast emails.
Consumers are more likely to buy from you when you deliver custom content.
So it turns out, you can’t just automate bad marketing.
And in fact, in a few years, it won’t even be possible anymore.
10-15 years ago, we bought and sold lists of home addresses.
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Then, we moved on to buying lists of home phone numbers.
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And then we bought lists of email addresses.
But in the next 3-5 years, you won’t have channels like email that can be easily bought, sold and abused.
Email will still be important sure, but there will be all these other channels you need to communicate in, too, and you won’t be able to easily buy, sell and abuse them.
And even if you could get your hands on them, the buyer is in control. The buyer is ignoring you.
They’re blocking ads. 198 million people had Ad Blocker software installed at the end of last year. And that cuts across many demographics.
Consumers are leaving even their FAVORITE websites because of intrusive ads.
They’re skipping TV ads.
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Or, throwing out cable all together and investing in things like Hulu and Netflix, which offer ad-free or limited-ad options.
Let’s talk about the people buying the limited ad option. The industry calls these people “ad acceptors”.
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But I would argue that they’re more like ad zombies.
Because you know what happens when an ad comes on? People get up to change laundry, get into their phone, get up to make popcorn, check email, etc.
How many of you have done this?
We’ve dug ourselves into a pretty big hole as marketers. No wonder we have a trust problem!
We have to change.
The way to change is to move from outbound to inbound.
That means moving from things like interruptive ads, cold calling and one-size-fits-all or cold emails - things that are centric to your company, to things that are centric to your buyer - helpful, relevant content, personalized emails and workflows that are human, not robotic.
Problems like this.
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Let’s start with number one.
This is where content and distribution come in.
You need to create awesome stuff and then distribute it in a really smart way - both on your site and off your site.
It used to be that these things were separate but today, they’re really the same thing.
In the last year, Buzzfeed has increased monthly views of it’s content by 2.5x, from 2.8 to 7 billion. Wow.
They must have just created a lot more stuff, right?
Wrong.
They got there by creating a diversity of content. 75% of those monthly views happen off buzz feed.com They happen on other channels. This is how you have to think about content and distribution. You want to create amazing content and then distribute it in all of the places that make sense to your audience. Now, yes, you want to start with a blog - and we are going to give you some concrete examples of how to do that. But the world is changing and we can’t afford to ignore the diverse set of traffic and awareness sources that exists today.
Now, I know what some of you are thinking. Wait - I’m already doing content marketing.
Yes, the large majority of B2B and even B2C marketers report having a content strategy or using content marketing.
But - only about half feel like they know what success looks like.
Why is that?
Shopify does a great job with diversity of content.
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Look at all those content types in the navigation. They have articles, guides, podcasts, free tools, success stories and more.
<click to play video as you talk.>
Square has a great resource center for small businesses with great content. You’ll find everything from articles on small business loans to technical resources about things like the decline of the magstripe.
Free tools are another great way to provide valuable content. Here, this solar company is offering people the ability to calculate how much they might save by moving to solar energy.
What do these things have in common?
They’re valuable and helpful. They resonate with the audience because they deliver information people need and are looking for.
And guess what? When you have this content, people can find you!
Here’s a blog post that we first published back in 2013. Look how much traffic it was still getting 2 years later.
Think about the initial investment we made in writing that post, and how much it’s paid off.
Why is getting so much traffic, so many years later? Is it because we promote it every day? No.
No, it’s because people are still searching for keywords related to this post. And it’s answering their questions.
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Today, it still ranks #1 for press release template, a keyword that gets over 12,000 monthly searches
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And it ranks #3 for “how to write a press release”, another keyword that gets over 12,000 monthly searches.
And when you do this at a regular cadence over a sustained period of time, you get even more leverage.
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Because your level of effort stays constant.
This is why inbound can provide much more leverage than paying for advertising. Now, yes, there is a time and a place for paid - it can help jumpstart a campaign or boost an already successful piece of content. But this type of leverage is what money can’t buy you.
Think about the effort we put into that blog post two years ago. For a fixed amount of effort, we’re still getting leverage, years later.
Now that you’ve got traffic and awareness, let’s talk about conversions.
A conversion is essentially an exchange - where you are providing something of value and the person on the other end is engaging further with you. Usually, by providing more information about themselves.
This means you’ve earned the right to talk to them further.
The way that exchange happens is typically through a form, probably on a landing page, but it could be directly on your website, too.
This is your opportunity to move people a bit further down your funnel.
Here’s an example from one of our customers that I really love. It’s from Yale Appliance and they’re offering an appliance buying guide, in exchange for some basic information about you.
When someone is considering a purchase, like a new kitchen appliance, they need information. Yale is doing inbound because they are providing content that will help that buyer make an informed decision.
(Kipp: Tells personal home improvement story here)
Not only do you need opportunities for someone to convert and for that exchange to happen, but how they get there is really key.
Let me explain why.
I’m going to use the same blog post example we talked about earlier. Remember this post about how to write a press release? The one that was still generating a ton of traffic years after it was written?
Well it always got a ton of traffic, but it didn’t always convert well. In fact, when we looked at our high traffic posts that didn’t convert well, this one was at the top of the list.
Why?
Because people were finding this post mainly from those two organic search queries I talked about earlier - ‘how to write a press release’ and ‘press release template’.
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BUT - And this is a big BUT - all of the CTAs in the article were positioned as “Free Ebook & Template: The Newsworthy Guide to Inbound Public Relations.” I think we were probably trying to be a little too clever for our own good.
So, we updated the language and the CTAs through out the post. We also added CTAs in a few really key areas.
First, an in-line CTA near the top of the post.
Second, a slide-in CTA that appears when the person is about half way done with the article.
And finally, a CTA at the end of the post.
And after we did that, this is what happened.
That’s why your conversion path, in addition to just giving people the opportunity to convert, is key.
So that’s how you solve a conversion or a leads problem.
But what if what you need is more customers and more revenue?
In order to drive more revenue, sales and marketing have a shared job to move people further down the funnel.
Let’s look at what your sales team needs to close business and overachieve on their revenue targets. They need:
1. People to talk to
2. Context about those people
3. Resources and tools to close deals with those people.
And marketing is more of a part of this process than ever.
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Well you can go ahead and check off the leads box. You just did this by generating awareness and interest and converting that interest into leads. Let’s talk about what context they need.
They need context like this. Let’s say Michael Smith is a lead.
You want your sales team to know that Michael has read your content, opened an email, tweeted about your company, viewed the pricing page, or watched a customer testimonial video.
This is all information that you have as the marketer and you want to make sure your sales team has this context, too.
<video will play through 4 examples - A customer case study from Zendesk for box.com, A Datanyze case study, an ROI calculator from Zendesk and finally customer testimonials from Brainshark. Each is up for 2.5 seconds>
Now let’s talk about the resources and tools your sales team needs, post-conversion, to help close business.
They need things like case studies, email workflows, sales scripts, product sheets, competitor comparisons, email templates, ROI calculators and customer testimonials.
These are all things that marketing can create.
When all of these things come together - great content, a solid conversion experience and then a relevant, human and helpful sales experience, you are able to generate more revenue.
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Your brand will come through and your company will have delivered a holistic inbound experience to your customers.