1) Permission marketing, also called inbound marketing, is about empowering customers to choose a company through helpful content and tools, rather than pushing ads on them. 2) The key is engaging customers at the "Rendezvous", either online or offline, to build relationships and eventually convert them to customers. 3) Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for attracting an audience through keywords and getting other sites to link to your content, like the "cool kids" in middle school. Making great content and news helps drive those links.

1. What in the heck is
INBOUND MARKETING
PERMISSION
What the heck is Inbound
Marketing? …or as I prefer to
call it, Permission Marketing.
?
I’ll start with a story… Twenty
years ago, I worked for RR
Donnelley, the world's largest
printing company. My boss had
me write a white paper that I
titled...

2. PRINT IS
Dead
The thesis was that the Internet would replace print and we had better figure this out.
Print may not be dead but the Internet has had a huge impact on printing. Donnelley is
still struggling to get it and their profits show that. All of this just illustrates what we've
all witnessed...

3. T were part of our culture
hey
PEOPLE LOVED ADS
In our lifetimes we've seen the biggest
societal change since Gutenberg’s press.
Nowhere has this been more evident than
in the ad business. It used to be that you
could put an ad in a magazine or on TV
and people would buy your product. That
doesn’t work anymore.

4. Was it Woodstock?
You can point at lots of causes for the change. The Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, the economic
crisis in the late 70’s, but I think the change was driven by technology...

5. … and specifically, it was driven
by the VCR. For the first time,
We The People were in charge of
how people would market to us.
If I don't like your commercial,
I'm just going to fast forward
through it and with that,
Permission Marketing was born.
LUNCH AND LEARN
Note the handsome wood grain

6. Then the Internet came along and
really gave consumers a choice. I
remember my first online
permission marketing experience.
In ‘92, my wife and I were headed
to Williamsburg, Virginia. I found
three bed and breakfasts on
America Online. I had them all bid
for our business. It's more
sophisticated now but the
fundamentals haven’t changed.

7. Permission marketing is about…
The idea is to empower the market
with tools to help them choose and ATTRACTION
ENGAGEMENT
then of course be so great that they
choose you. The marketing funnel that
we always talk about is a 4-step
RELATIONSHIP
process. First you need to attract
traffic. Once you have an audience,
you need to engage them, building
CONVERSION
relationships as you go, then convert
these relationships into customers.

8. Permission marketing is about…
To me, the most critical part of the
process is mid-funnel, and that’s ATTRACTION
ENGAGEMENT
engagement. I figure that if we're
engaged, then turning that into a
relationship is pretty easy. Once you
RELATIONSHIP
get people to this point Then even if
they don’t buy today I’ve created an
ambassador who will help me in the
CONVERSION
future.

9. In the Old West, once a year thousands of trappers, frontiersmen, Indians, traders and
industrialists from the East would meet for a Rendezvous south of Jackson Hole,
Wyoming. For them, this was the highlight of the year and the culmination of the
season. Most of these people led rather solitary lives so the Rendezvous was the
social event of the year. At the Rendezvous, stories of adventure were shared and
Fortunes were made.
THE RENDEZVOUS

10. Where’s our Rendezvous?
At the core of any permission
marketing strategy is the place
where the engagement happens
– the Rendezvous. This can be
anywhere that makes sense for
the business: real world or online
– a website, Facebook page,
YouTube channel, a blog or
thousands of other places.

11. I'm an amateur landscape
photographer. My Rendezvous is
Flickr. It's the place that I direct
everyone interested in my
pictures to engage me.
Engagement

12. For some companies, their
Rendezvous is the telephone.
Nothing happens without a live
conversation. For others, their
Rendezvous is their website’s
Contact Us form. Think of the
Rendezvous as the place where
we come together for a
conversation. Before there’s a
Point of Choice – there’s a
Rendezvous.
Where’s your RENDEZVOUS?

13. No ask … no dance.
The goal is engagement but it starts with
attraction and that’s hard! Ever since we
took control of how we would be marketed
to, marketers have struggled with this. We
dress up all nice in our best suit to wait and
hope the pretty girl asks us to dance.

14. THIS IS THE
FUNDAMENTAL CHALLENGE OF PERMISSION
MARKETING
We put up websites with the best
graphics words and hope that
someone clicks. But just like
fishing, we'll be most successful if
we have lots of lines in the water,
and we drop our lines into the best
streams. Online, that means SEO.

15. Search Engine Optimization is a
subject with enough material
to cover a month's worth of
lunchtime discussions. My goal
GOT
LUNCH?
here today is that you gain an
understanding of a couple of
principles but I’m not going to
attempt even overview here of
everything involved with SEO.

16. KEYWORDS
You probably get the basics:
Keywords are the words and
phrases that people enter into
a search engine in order to find
your website. But since Google
indexes every word on the
website, what’s the difference
between any word and a
keyword?
?

17. Just because you didn't identify
a certain phrase as a keyword
doesn't mean that it can't be
found in a search. The strategy
with keywords is to find words
that you don't rank high for and
then work on them. We don't
need to focus on developing the
keyword "point of choice"
because we already rank high.
Google: #2 #3 #4

18. You work on a keyword by focusing
on it. Start by working those words
into the copy on your pages. Going
further, make it the gist of a page.
If something like “market
segmentation and modeling” is
something you want to focus on,
make a page about it and link to
other pages on the subject.
FOCUS?

19. LINK BUILDING
Which brings me to my second element of
SEO that I’d like to talk about is link
building. If you thought anything else I
talked about sounded hard, link building is
harder. There are lots of factors that Google
considers when ranking your page. Most
important among them is who is linking to
you.

20. Willingness to be Friends
Google figures that if a site
links to you, then they’re in a
THE MIDDLE SCHOOL
sense, voting for your content.
Google takes into account not
just the number of links, but
CONUNDRUM
who is doing the linking. It's
kind of like middle school. You
can tell who the cool kids are
by the kids that hang out with
them. Unfortunately, as most of
us know, it's hard to get the
cool kids to like you.
How Cool the Kid Is

21. How to get the cool kids
to like you…
BE GREAT
SHARE THE LOVE
MAKE NEWS There are four things you can do to help
develop links. First, create great content
- stuff people will want to link to.
Second, put links to other sites on your
site - people are inclined to link to you
if you link to them first! And, be
newsworthy so they feel they have to
link to you

22. HOW CAN YOU
Two of the steps are easy. We
have great content and we can
set up links, but the third step
MAKE NEWS?
is tricky. How can you make
news?

23. Find your Rendezvous
and drive your traffic there
RECAP Be great … make news
Don’t go to the dance
without a date