Surely the whole word "marketing" means it is about going "out" to find customers, to be present in the "marketplace" and thereby enabling sales? That was the question posed this week to me in a mentoring session I was running.
The question arose because I was talking about the value of "Inbound Marketing". But what is that, I was asked; it is a common question.
The term was coined in 2005 by the MIT lecturer and founder of HubSpot, Brian Halligan. Essentially it means that a company does things that allows them to be found by their potential clients, rather than having to go out and get business.
If you think about traditional marketing, it is all about going out of your business to get customers. Indeed, in most of those "outbound" marketing efforts you have to "buy" customers. You buy them as a result of advertising, cold calling, telesales, exhibitions and so on. All of these activities require you to pay money to go outside your business and gain customers as a result.
Inbound marketing, on the other hand, is where you do "stuff" that allows people to find you. They come into your business because they have found out about you somehow.
Prior to the Internet, inbound marketing was not really practiced. Indeed, if you had done it you would have taken years to see any impact. With the Internet, though, inbound marketing becomes easy.
Take for instance the simple addition of a blog to your business. All you have to do is write and people find it when they are searching for that topic on Google. They come to you as a result of you writing articles. This is called "content marketing" and is part of inbound marketing. In the past, if you had used content marketing to drive people to your business you would have been limited to occasional appearances in printed newspapers and magazines, taking ages to build up any real presence. But with the Internet you can get thousands of people through your doors each month simply by having a blog.
In short, inbound marketing takes place in stages:
1.Devise articles, blog posts, podcasts, videos, white papers, reports, booklets, books, infographics, newsletters and other forms of content that your target audience will be interested in.
2.Promote these content items using social media, word of mouth and so on to gain traffic.
3.Convert traffic into leads and then on to sales
Of course you need to analyse the interest in your content and produce more of the stuff that gains the greatest interest and the highest conversion rates.
Studies show that companies which focus on inbound marketing have a significantly lower cost of customer acquisition than businesses that focus on traditional marketing. In other words, if you spend most of your marketing time and budget on doing "stuff" on the web you will increase your profits because you will save money in acquiring the leads you need. Even if you only achieved the same number of leads as you did with traditional marketing, you'd make more money.
So, "what is inbound marketing"? It is a profit driver for all businesses - and a potential life-saver for others.
WHAT I LEARNED THIS WEEK
Don't trust web companies to care for you
Twice in the past week my Twitter account was hacked into. Someone - I tracked him down to Las Vegas - was breaking into my Twitter account and sending out Tweets. Luckily, those Tweets were not too damaging; they merely pointed people to a fake BBC News web page that was promoting some kind of diet aid. I deleted the Tweets and reset my password and all was OK. Except......in the process I asked for support via the Twitter support service. Well "service" is the wrong word. In spite of asking more than a dozen times, I have been completely ignored. So I checked forums where Twitter is discussed to discover hundreds of people all making similar complaints that Twitter ignored the fact that their accounts had been hacked and offered no support, in spite of claiming to do so. I dug around for information and found that Twitter themselves have been on a bit of PR offensive lately, with plenty of articles about how they are "beefing up" security and making hacking difficult. The problem is, all of that is PR puffery. Whilst they are putting bolts and chains on the front door, they have left the back door wide open. Anyone - and I mean anyone - with a Twitter account can become a "developer" and produce software that can gain access to any Twitter account. There is no verification of these individuals, no indemnity required either. So whilst Twitter is making it more secure for you to log into your own account, they are still allowing any old Tom, Dick or Harry to burst in through the back. This fact has also been raised by people online - and ignored by Twitter themselves. I have concluded one thing - apart from the fact that Twitter clearly couldn't care a jot about its users - and that is if you want to be secure online, you have to do it all yourself. You can no longer trust the online brands to look after you.
Graham Jones
Internet Psychologist
Web: grahamjones.co.uk
About Graham Jones
Graham Jones is a professional speaker, psychologist, consultant and author who specialises in the way people use the Internet.