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Stop Bad Marketing

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About 2 years ago, Brian Halligan, CEO of Hubspot shared some observations and tips regarding inbound marketing, at a session from Dreamforce. Although, Brian believes that outdated marketing playbooks of the past still provide some value to older generations, but will struggle to be relevant to the younger generations. 

Halligan notes that, “Humans, all of us, we’re getting kind of sick and tired of being marketed to and we’re getting very clever at blocking bad marketing out.” Instead, Halligan states that we need to provide customers something of value when it comes to marketing. Something that will draw them in and increase their brand experience.

3 Steps Toward Marketing That People Love

 

1. Create

First step, stop bad marketing. We need to generate traffic by producing terrific content. The goal is to pull people from across the search engines, social media platforms, and blogs/forums across the web. Marketing departments should concentrate on producing valuable content. The content they produce should attract these visitors like a magnet. Halogen said, “Each piece of content you create is like a mini magnet that pulls in customers and prospects.” Content includes blog posts, ebooks, webinars, videos, whitepapers, and many more. This content will last forever and pull customers forever

 

2. Optimize

Once your content strategy is up and going, the next step is to optimize the content. Marketers have gotten better at SEO, but complete optimization includes SMO which is social media optimization. That might be a new term to some, but what does it exactly mean? For example, “How do I create titles for my content so that it virally spreads on platforms such as Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc?” Even content that isn’t that great can be fully optimized with a title that can spread like a wildfire. This is better than producing mediocre content with a mediocre title. 

3. Promote

Last, you need to be very good at promoting your content. Make sure you are pushing them throughout the various social media platforms. Your fully optimized content will get lots of engagement, and you’ll get a big community built around your company. The better content you produce, the more engagement and promotion will be received through social media. It’s not enough to hope that people just stumble across your content from a search, be active across social channels and show off your great content. 

From Content to Context

Creating content is a great start, but it is not enough. Inbound Marketing is about more than being found online. “What we want to do is create content to pull people into our funnel and then create context to pull people through our funnel,” notes Halligan.

 

He notes his Amazon.com experiences to highlight the value of creating context for your customers. “When I visit Amazon.com, they market to me Boston Red Sox books, they market to me Grateful Dead books. They really get me. I’m into the Sox, I’m a season ticket holder. I’ve been to a hundred Grateful Dead shows. I’ve never met a soul from Amazon yet they really understand me and know how I think and give me this really personalized, highly contextualized experience. This is what’s really special about that.”

Brian says this highly contextualized experience is what makes many top brands (i.e. Netflix, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Groupon) so successful. “They create these little micro-segments, segments of one, that are highly personalized and they use that personalization to get us converting from leads into customers. This is what makes these guys giant companies, this massive contextualization of their websites.”

 

How is this done? The more you use these websites, the more they know about you. They are personalizing your experiences more and more with every visit. This makes each visit more valuable than the last. The more valuable they become, the more likely you are to convert a visitor into a lead and even a lead into a customer. “Very few, almost no marketers, are good at personalizing the entire interaction with the customers,” says Halligan “and this is how you get really high conversation rates like Amazon and all of those other internet-based companies.”

So how do you create inbound marketing? How do you stop bad marketing? How do you create marketing people love? “You create compelling content, you pull people into the top of the funnel with that content, and then you create g remarkable context by truly personalizing your emails, your website, and the mobile experience to pull people through your funnel.

If you enjoy this post you might be interested in this read about 3 Ways to Better Position Your Business Online. User our offer below to help start your inbound marketing efforts.  

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Thank you for taking the time to read my basics of inbound marketing post. If you liked my post and want to get in touch with me you can find me on Twitter andLinkedIn. Use our offer below to help you get started.

 

Kaushal Kakadia

Kaushal Kakadia is Sociallyin's CTO/COO. He is an inbound marketing expert, Google Adwords expert, and a New Orleans Sports expert. He is responsible for the daily operations of the agency and the web development department.

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