Inbound Marketing Works

Some inbound marketing tips about half way down. But, ya know, I just gotta start with a story.

OK, no big surprise here… I just have to say it. Inbound marketing does work. Why am I bringing up this subject that you probably think about every day? Because I have been starting to see some thinking that the overabundance of marketing content and SEO activity, especially in your B2B space (I am talking about advertising agency business development), is reducing the effectiveness of inbound. Well, it is. In fact, all forms of marketing appear to be less effective for the average marketer. But, here is the deal. A hefty segment of inbound marketers are clearly winning. They are winning because of their strategic approach, well-targeted tactics and, most importantly, how they execute. The winners use both best practices and the objective of being unignorable.

Some background.

My wife and I are building a house down here in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. It will kinda look like the photo on the left – more windows and a different color. Click on the link to see why we moved down here and how (yes, I know that some of you have thought about leaving the USA too — shhhh, I won’t tell). As new house builders and ones that will need to purchase a bunch of furniture because we totally downsized when we left Portland OR last July, we need some new stuff. This got me thinking that I’d rather have people like you buy my services and send me cash vs. simply raiding my savings. Therefore, I ramped up my inbound marketing about a month ago to slightly increase my leads. Because, yes you know this is coming… Inbound works.

The Inbound Marketing Switch

Over the past four weeks, I’ve gotten inbound leads from advertising agencies in Sweden, Dubai, Adelaide, Botswana, San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, and Toledo. I’ve even gotten incoming from multi-national networks.

I got these seemingly random, but very hot global leads because I flipped the inbound switch. A switch I found in 1995.

I have been doing social media and inbound marketing since the mid-90’s. Without getting into great detail, my first web business was New Jersey Online, a very early news website. We used social media in the form of viewer forums about New Jersey and New York sports (the Giants, Jets, Knicks, Nets, Islanders, Rangers and Devils, oh and the Yankees and Mets) and all the local kid’s sports teams and entertainment to capture the attention of a huge audience. We added daily content from four news sources (they were called newspapers). We grew an audience that  was even larger than the New York Time’s website (I love saying this.) We won the New Jersey / New York metro battle by using social media, the power of sharing and… inbound marketing.

Back To Today

Here are the the switches I’ve thrown since January. No, no secrets here. It is just about execution and online sales pressure. I offer these as a reminder that targeted inbound marketing activity begets sales lead activity.

• I’ve been posting more often. Some are long posts repurposed from other thought-leadership platforms I’ve used.
• I’ve been amplifying and reposting my current and past best read posts beyond my website via my newsletter, linkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
• I agreed to speak at my client Hannapin Marketing’s big Los Angeles PPC Hero Conference. They have promoted me.
• Because of the speaking gig, I was interviewed by Paul Wicker of the super-smart ad tech company ADSTAGE.
• A very large multi-office agency (one I am going to give a pitching seminar to) decided to tell all of their execs to buy my book on pitching and then get reimbursed. February was one of my best selling months. The book, actually an outbound strategy, gets the word out.
• HubSpot is about to run another one of my guest posts and they just invited me to present on one of their large international webinars.

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So, my message is simple. Inbound activity works. Google likes it and they grant you better search positioning (FYI: it took Google less than an hour to crawl this page). Increased activity stimulates the readers of your emails, Facebook page, LinkedIn Followers and your groups. Stimulation with the right content to the right people delivers sales leads.

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And, since I know you like infographics, here is a crisp one from StraightNorth. As they say,”The Internet marketing lead generation ecosystem illustrates how all components fit together to form cohesive campaigns. It is intended to give marketing leaders a blueprint for building a complete Internet marketing strategy that maximizes sales lead generation.”