Inbound Marketing

Hubspot started was started in 2006 by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. They created the company around their concept of Inbound Marketing in 2006. The concept of was turned into a methodology to help marketers change their approach from the heavily outbound focus that was dominant at the time (outbound meaning advertising & cold calling etc.) to a more organic, content driven approach where brands can win customers by supporting their search for solutions and their decision making process and leading them to their brand only if they are ready to buy. They named this approach “Inbound marketing”. Fast forward to 2019 and Hubspot has gone through massive growth and indeed change. Their tool set involved from a smart way to build landing pages, SEO optimised blogposts and get better reporting on your visitors to a full blown SAAS ecosystem of Marketing, Sales, Service and CRM tools that are all tightly integrated.  So how did they get here and where are they headed in 2020? That’s what we will have look at during the following paragraphs

Welcome to part 2 of this  multi-part series about the ins and outs of successful growth marketing. In part one we discussed the big picture and how methodologies underpin everything we do in growth marketing.In this part, we are going to have a deeper look into the different tools you can use to build a successful growth marketing stack and their pro's and cons. 

Video marketing will continue to be a top performer in 2020, helping to drive more engagement and brand recall  than any other content format on social media. It is a key component of a holistic Inbound approach to your marketing. Video can help support not only awareness but also consideration and decision making campaigns as well.  Quality of course plays a key factor here and you need to ensure that you are producing top notch video content in order to succeed. 

Why it's good to be aware about methodologies and concepts?

It can be very hard for me to keep a clear grasp of how all the different Methodologies, concepts, tasks and buzzwords relate to each other and where to focus my attention. This a big problem for me as it affects the balance of my marketing and also service delivery related activities.  At times, I get a sort of vertigo and get very confused about where I should focus my attention. 

If I loose sight of our goals and principles I am likely to fail in the long term. If I focus too much on the long term and miss out on the daily activities that keep our marketing machine running, I fail immediately . To ensure I find a balance between these two ways of thinking and working I have to be able to see the bigger picture. The framework  that I can place all these principles,  tasks etc. into so that I can actually use them to reach our goals.

At About Inbound, we focus heavily on knowledge and communication. Our clients depend on us to give them clarity, quality and peace of mind, so in short, if I am not clear about what I am doing or about how to apply the concepts we sell, I am kind off.. well... useless. 

To combat these moments of marketing research "vertigo" I often try to order my learning on paper or chat it through with Vourneen who is About Inbound's founder and ultimate super expert. This ordering of thoughts helps me make sense of it all and has over time allowed me to quickly grasp new concepts and approaches because I can visualize where they "sit" in the jungle that is modern growth marketing. I also noticed that many of our clients run into similar issues. They know many of the buzzwords and definitions but can't quite connect them together, or they are unable to apply them because they are too snowed under in their day-to-day tasks..

To help define some of the workings of a modern Growth strategy I decided to create a series of posts around it. I hope they can help you in your quest to keep your marketing growth stars aligned and making them work for you.

Disclaimer: Just to let you know, both I and About Inbound have no affiliation to the INBOUND event. This is an independent guide with helpful information based on our experiences  and is meant for those travelling to INBOUND this year. Particularly first timers that are travelling internationally.  If you have any feedback or comments, we'd love to hear them. For official information visit inbound.com

We're well into summer and many of our clients are starting to plan their trips to  Inbound 2018., the annual event that is held from the 4th until the 7th of September. This is the time of year that the questions about planning and preparation for Inbound crop up again. To make life as easy as possible for everyone, we decided to write down some of the most asked travel and preparation tips for the Inbound conference in 2018 for easy reference.

We just don’t buy like we used to. Instead of reaching out to sales people or going into stores early on in our journey, we begin with research on Google, seeking out recommendations from our network on Facebook or LinkedIn and consuming content online. By the time we speak to sales, our mind is just about made up about the purchase. So why is it that we still market like it’s 2005 and treat our potential buyers as if they want to be sold at? Technology has facilitated the shift in buying for years. This has changed consumer attitudes in B2B and B2C which dictates us to change our marketing tactics. Increased regulations like GDPR and PECR also mean that as marketers we have to change our behavior.

GDPR seems like and is a huge task to tackle. As inbound marketers, we can argue that it’s actually not all bad news as it reinforces that you should only market to people who are interested in hearing from you.

Of course, we can’t simplify it to just that statement but much of privacy law in Europe actually comes down to balancing your legitimate interest and the privacy rights and freedoms of your data subjects, or the people in your database. Funnily enough though, after following the basic rules set out in the regulation, you can come up with an answer to many cases by asking yourself ‘Does it feel right?’.

There is a big buzz around ABM or Account based marketing at the moment. Lots of clients are asking about best practices, how to implement or transition to ABM. I thought maybe there was something I was missing. Had I overlooked a transformative new marketing strategy? Then I got slightly paranoid and starting asking others about it, but they came back with what I already knew. Then I thought I would do some extra research. There was so much interest, there must be something to it, right?

To be honest, even as a HubSpot employee I did not know what to really expect as I boarded the plane to Boston on the last week in September. I knew this was an event that would have a lot of cool tech companies and celebrity speakers present but the scale of the event is something that I don't think I could of even prepared for.

One of the hardest parts of working in marketing is keeping your skills up to date. I have made this slightly easier for you by listing several recomended learning resources in this post. This is reflected in the latest State of Inbound Report where 19% said training was the company's top challenge. Most of us spend time implementing, planning and executing campaigns. Leaving little room to brush up or expand your skill set. However, this is a dangerous tactic if you want to grow your career and become a successful T Shaped marketer (see Buffer's or Moz's diagram below).