Inbound Marketing The Art of Not Sucking - The Content Marketing Show
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My presentation from the Content Marketing Show. How Inbound Marketing can all help us marketers to suck a little less in the content we produce.
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Inbound Marketing The Art of Not Sucking - The Content Marketing Show
- 1. INBOUND INBOUND MARKETING: MARKETING: THE ART OF THE ART OF NOT SUCKING. NOT SUCKING. Kieran Flanagan, Marketing Director (EMEA) @ HubSpot Kieran Flanagan, Marketing Director (EME) @ HubSpot @searchbrat kflanagan@hubspot.com @searchbrat kflanagan@hubspot.com
- 2. MARKETERS ARE NOT LOVED. car salespeople stockbrokers Polticians lawyers marketers Less Lovable More Lovable
- 4. Don’t believe me, want some examples?
- 6. Spam: “The Aids equivalent for the internet. No known cure.” Source: http://www.urbandictionary.com/
- 8. Pop up ads: “The reason the internet sucks.” Source: http://www.urbandictionary.com/
- 11. SUCKING A LOT LESS AT MARKETING 1 Generic Understand Your Audience 2 Interruptive Aim for Remarkable 3 Selfish Promote Value
- 13. MARKETING MARY • • • • • Primary Professional marketer (VP, Director, Manager) Mid-sized company (25-200 employees) Small marketing team (1-5 people) BComm (BU), MBA (Babson) 42, Married, 2 Kids (10 and 6) Goals: • Support sales with collateral and leads • Manage company communications • Build awareness Challenges: • Too much to do • Not sure how to get there • Marketing tool and channel mess Loves HubSpot because: • Easy to use tools that make her life easier • Learn inbound marketing best practices • Easier reporting to sales and CEO
- 14. OWNER OLLIE • • • • • Secondar y Business owner (Founder, President, Partner) Small business (1-10 employees) Industry expert with no marketing experience BA History (University of Illinois) 44, Married, 3 Kids (20, 16, and 11) Goals: • Deliver on past sales • Generate new sales • Keep the business running Challenges: • Lack of marketing expertise • No control over marketing assets • No time or budget for marketing Loves HubSpot because: • Get more sales and leads • Get control over marketing assets • Learn Inbound Marketing
- 15. ENTERPRISE ERIN • • • • • Secondar y Director of Marketing Operations (VP Marketing , Product Marketing) Large company (200-2,000 employees) Marketing team of 15+ BS (Merrimack), MBA (Bentley) 30, Married recently Goals: • Demand/pipeline generation • Campaign execution and coordination Challenges: • Working with sales • Data & technlogy overload • Selling use cases to IT, Legal, Sales, Execs • • • • Loves HubSpot because: Integration with all of her systems Homebase for marketing with takeaways Easy to execute on campaigns Stay at the forefront of marketing
- 16. 23% of European marketers are focused on reaching the right audience, and converting them into leads. Resource: http://offers.hubspot.com/2013-state-of-inbound-marketing-europe
- 17. @ tweet this A successful Inbound Marketing strategy is anchored around your different buyer personas @Searchbrat
- 19. Create content that adds value,
- 20. Create content that adds value, solves a pain point,
- 21. Create content that adds value, solves a pain point, or just entertains.
- 22. WHAT WOULD MY AUDIENCE PAY FOR ?.
- 29. @ tweet this Being remarkable is something you strive for, a mindset, not just marketing fluff. @Searchbrat
- 30. Promote Value 3
- 31. @ tweet this Marketers will always ask how to do more content. The right question is how do I distribute it to the right people @Searchbrat
- 34. THE POSSIBLE EYEBALLS YOU CAN GENERATE. Distribution Channels Engagement (CTR) Engaged Audience Blog 50,000 6% 3000 Email 10,000 3% 300 Facebook 8000 2.5% 200 Twitter 1000 0.5% 5 Co-Brand Content Available Audience 30000 1.5% 450
- 35. @ tweet this If you spend 10 hours developing a piece of content you should spend at least 10 hours promoting it. @Searchbrat
- 41. Seed to people with the same
- 42. Facebook – Custom Audiences / Interests / Individuals / Retargeting
- 44. PAID CONTENT DISCOVERY IS GOING TO BE BIG. www.outbrain.com www.taboola.com
- 45. Take time to understand your audience.
- 47. And promote the value you create
- 48. Get in Contact. Twitter: @searchbrat LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kieranjflanagan Google+: Search for “Kieran Flanagan:
Editor's Notes
- My name is Kieran Flanagan and I am the marketing director for HubSpot in Europe. HubSpot are a Boston based company, our international HQ is in Dublin and we sell a marketing platform. I’m here today to talk about inbound marketing and how it can help us to suck a little less at marketing
- But first I am going to talk about a problem us Marketers have, and that’s we’re not very loveable. Based on a poll run by a company in the US called Gallup politics, marketers are trusted less than stockbrokers and lawyers. That’s pretty bad considering what’s happened over the past 5 years. We managed to stay ahead of politicians and care salespeople. I think the day we are trusted less than politicians is the day we might need to find new careers. This poll really got me thinking about marketing. It’s a career I am deeply passionate about. But it’s obviously a profession a lot of other people find annoying.
- I think other people find it annoying because we often create experiences that suck. Good marketing shouldn’t feel like marketing at all. It should add value to our audience so they don’t even think of it as marketing.
- I obviously can’t turn up at a marketing conference and say marketing can sometimes suck without bringing out a few examples.
- We don’t make enough of an effort to understand our audience. We just create generic experiences for everyone in the hope someone will like it. I am sure everyone gets emails like this all the time. Email is the easiest channel to personalise around our different audiences. It’s the easiest channel for us to deliver the right content to the right people. Personalised emails get a 14% higher click through rate. But marketers still fail to even personalise their email communication. I love the fact this person thinks I am HubSpot, it plays to my giant ego and they got my job title right. But this isn’t’ relevant to me. When we fail to understand our audience, all of marketing is going to feel like spam, not just our email.
- We create really bad experiences by interrupting what people are doing online. I love this example from Toyota. It’s a great example of a pop up ad placement gone wrong. Not the best news article for their ad to be appearing under. Everyone on this planet finds pop up ads annoying, but marketers keep creating them. We need to create things our audience choose to engage with, not more pop up ads
- As marketers we think about our needs a lot and promote ourselves pretty shamelessly at the wrong times. This is another great example from Toyota, who created multiple twitter accounts to spam the superbowlhashtag with their competition We need to find the right moments and opportunities to promote ourselves.
- For the rest of this presentation, I am going to talk about how we can take an inbound approach to these 3 areas of marketing and
- Turn them into something that sucks a lot less.
- At the heart of any successful inbound marketing strategy is a well thought out & understood buyer persona. A great inbound marketer should be able to figure out who their different buying personas are, what type of goals they have, their different pain points and what are their challenges. This is going to help us create content that’s of real value to each of our personas.
- This is one of HubSpots real buyer personas. We call her Marketing Mary. This is the one page buyer persona. What usually happens is you start out with a far longer version and condense it into a one pager. You can see we add things like biographic & demographic information. Plus we add things like her goals, challenges and why she would buy HubSpot. All of this information is going to help us develop the right kind of content for her, at each stage of the buying process. When starting out, most companies will start with a primary buying persona. Marketing Mary is our primary persona. That’s our sweet spot.
- As the company evolves they usually end up with secondary personas. For example Owner Ollie used to be our primary persona, before we created Marketing Mary as our tools became more sophisticated.
- Enterprise Erin was added 18 months ago as we added a lot more functionality that appealed to Enterprise marketers and we began selling a lot more in that space. These buyer personas help us to produce the right content for our different audience segments
- From our state of inbound marketing report this year, where we surveyed over 3500 marketers, the top goal for European marketers was reaching the right audience and converting them to leads. That’s not going to be possible unless you have the right content to attract those people to your site and the right content for them to download so they become a lead. You need to understand what your audience needs
- A successful inbound marketing strategy is anchored around your different buyer personas.
- The second part of this is aiming to be remarkable. Now I know a lot of people roll their eyes at words like this. For me, being remarkable is a mindset.
- It’s how do I create content that adds real value,
- That solves a real pain point for my audience
- Or simply entertains them
- When creating content for people to download, I’m thinking what my audience currently pay for that I can give to them for free.
- Luckily for me, there are lots of places I can find this information out.
- Have content that offers real value, beyond just text. For example, our Owner Ollie knows great looking call to actions are important, but often doesn’t have the resources to get them done, so we gave him customisable call to actions. He can just download them and customise them himself in powerpoint.
- Marketing Mary has to spend money on stock photos for her presentations, so we gave her 250 for free. This has been one of our best performing offers this year. Think about the things your audience are currently paying for and figure out if you can provide them for free
- Being remarkable helps you to create content assets that your audience chooses to engage with, rather than having to depend on interruptive techniques. Being remarkable is something you strive to be, it’s a mindset, it means you are going to create content that adds value your audience, solve a real pain point for them.
- You want to find the right time and opportunities to promote things of real value you create.
- Most marketers will obsess over the question of how they produce more content or better quality content. The right question to ask is how do we distribute this content to the right people
- When we put a lot of time and effort into a piece of content, what is my potential audience for that piece of content and what type of engagement can I expect
- I obsess over this a lot. This is from one of my whiteboards at home. For each piece of content, I want to know what is my potential audience, my expected engagement rate and from that I can figure out my expected engaged audience
- For example, you look at the things you can do to influence the engaged audience. I can advertise this across my blog, to my email list, across my Facebook and Twitter profiles and maybe this is a co-branded piece of content so another company is going to promote it to their list.From this I can put a number against the engaged audience I can generate for this piece of content.This is the potential engaged audience before we add in things like it taken off in social or ranking well in Google.What I want, is to increase all of these things. I want more distribution channels, I want to increase my available audience, I want a better engagement CTR
- Creating the content is only the starting point of the process. You want to invest just as much time in distributing it to the right audience.
- I really think companies will start to hire people to just focus on content distribution.
- To grow that engaged audience figure. We want more people to see the valuable content we produce.
- The great thing is, the more you build up your available audience, the more you can do things to grow your engaged audience.For example, when we email our database about our latest content piece, we can simply include a lazy tweet for them to share it with their network.
- People will do this and it helps to attract people from their networks back to our site.
- Another example of this is, the thank you pages people get to after they download a piece of content from us our personalised towards them. We use the information we have to create tailored messaging and we provide the option for them to forward that offer to a friend. It’s crazy the amount of people who do this.
- You want to find people with the right interests to seed your content to. It’s like creating a mini PR campaign for every piece of content
- On Facebook you can upload that email list you have and retarget them with your content offer. You can use lookalike audiences to expand that reach. You can target by interests or right down to individuals. If there are particular journalists or known bloggers on Facebook, you can target them with a personalised message.
- You can do the same on Twitter, target groups of people by interests and seed your content
- Paid content discovery is going to be big. As more and more companies up the stakes in content, we will have to pay to get initial eyeballs. The important thing to remember is the money spend to acquire those eyeballs will be wasted if the quality of the content isn’t good.