Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah: Inbound Marketing; Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online

Inbound Marketing

Today, anyone with a story to tell can command an audience — and customers — on the web.

Inbound marketing is about getting found online, through search engines and on social networking sites that billions of people use to find answers each day.

People did not want to be interrupted by marketers or harassed by salespeople. They wanted to be helped.

Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. — Victor Hugo

We called the traditional, interruptive methods “outbound marketing”.

Inbound was about pulling people in by sharing relevant information, creating useful content, and generally being helpful.

Though the idea of inbound made sense, people weren’t completely sure how to get started and how to make it work for their business.

So, on June 9, 2006 (MIT commencement day), we officially started HubSpot — a software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We started the company for two reasons. First, we believed in the transformative power of inbound marketing and how it could help businesses grow. Second, we wanted to make it easy for organizations to get into the game, so we committed to building a platform from the ground up that was expressly designed to help them do it.

Inbound Marketing what is it all about

What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so. — Mark Twain

Shopping Has Changed . . . Has Your Marketing?

People shop and learn in a whole new way compared to just a few years ago, so marketers need to adapt or risk extinction.

People primarily shop and gather information through search engines, such as Google.
Another place people gather information is the blogosphere and its more than 150 million blogs (as of this writing).
The third place people learn/shop is social media.

To be successful and grow your organization, you need to match the way you market your products to the way your prospects learn about and shop for your products. And you do that by generating leads through inbound marketing.

Is Your Website a Marketing Hub?

The history of the company website began with the paper brochure that was handed out at trade shows and stuffed into envelopes for mailing to unsuspecting victims (prospects).

In order to take full advantage of this collaborative power, you must rethink your website. Instead of “megaphone,” think “hub.” What we want you to do is to change the mode of your website from a one-way sales message to a collaborative, living, breathing hub for your marketplace.

RSS (which stands for “really simple syndication”) is a technology that allows content to be published and pushed to those users who are subscribed to a feed.

Are You Worthy?

You’ll need to ensure your company’s value proposition is truly remarkable. What do we mean by “remarkable”? We borrowed the term from Seth Godin who uses it in place of the word “unique,” and we took the liberty of italicizing “remark” in order to prompt you to ask yourself whether your product or service is worthy of other people’s “remarks.”

The trick is to stand out by becoming as remarkable (unique and valuable) as possible to a segment of buyers. Second, the Internet enables remarkable ideas to spread extremely quickly — far more quickly than pre-Internet days. Unremarkable ideas languish unfound.

We had a brilliant strategy professor at MIT named Arnoldo Hax, who used to frequently repeat the following phrase, “Watch your competitors, but don’t follow them.”

There are two ways to create a winning strategy in an era where remarkable ideas spread virally and you face more competitors than ever. The first method is to think across the traditional boundaries of your marketplace to alternatives, not just competitors.

The second method for creating a winning strategy in the era of inbound marketing is to be the world’s best at what you do within your existing market rules. If you are not the world’s best within your market, redefine your market more narrowly before one of your competitors takes that position.

Begin by asking questions. What are the sacred-cow rules in your industry that should be rethought? Rather than just focusing on competitors, what alternatives can you compete with that cross market boundaries? Rather than trying to expand your market, are you better off shrinking it and increasing profits from a more enthusiastic set of customers?

Get Found by Prospects

Create Remarkable Content

Beyond a remarkable value proposition, you must also create remarkable content about your company and products.

You want to move away from the mindset of hiding all of your remarkable content in your founder’s/salesperson’s/ consultant’s head and use that content to attract links to your site, build your brand and attract more people to your business.

Twenty years ago, your marketing effectiveness was a function of the width of your wallet. Today, your marketing effectiveness is a function of the width of your brain.

You need to create remarkable content, optimize that content (for search engines and social media sites), publish the content, market the content through blogs and social media, and measure what is working and what is not working.

First, track the number of other websites linking to your website.
Second, track the number of times someone shares your content on social media (like Twitter and Facebook).
Third, track the number of pages on your site that have been indexed by Google and are ready to be served on a moment’s notice to an eager searcher.

Get Found in the Blogosphere

In addition to your own blog content, you’ll want to invite others to write on your blog, including local professors interested in your industry, thoughtful customers, analysts in your industry, and other bloggers in your industry.

New bloggers often feel anxiety about how frequently they need to write. As a rule of thumb, we recommend you write a minimum of once per week.

With regard to SEO, the most important part of your article is the title.

Within the text of your article, look for important keyword phrases that describe your industry and turn them into hyperlinks. Techies call the words you can click on “anchor text.”

Many copywriting experts recommend that you spend half your time writing the article and half your time writing a catchy title.

The most frequent reason blogs fail is because the author or company writing the blog oversells their product or service. You want your blog to turn your website into a hub for your industry, not just be an advertisement for your product.

You can choose from many RSS readers, but we recommend Feedly. It’s free, and completely web-based, so there’s nothing to download.

Think about this process as though you were a lion hunting for elephants (customers). You want to hang around the watering hole (blog) where the most elephants come to drink and bathe.

The reason we’re advocating that you read blog content through an RSS reader is based on timeliness. If the blog you’re commenting on is very popular, it will have many comments posted to it literally minutes after the post goes live.

You want to be one of the first people to comment.

Whole Food’s content is remarkable. Because Whole Foods has been creating remarkable content since July 2006, its blog is now a major, sustainable asset to them with over 7,500-plus pages in Google’s index eligible to rank for different search terms. Over 12,000 other websites link to these 7,500 pages, giving Whole Foods 12,000 ways in which new customers can find them.

Get Found in Google

When users conduct Google searches, two kinds of results appear on the SERP (search engine results page): the “organic” search results (also known as “natural” results) and the paid or sponsored results.

That’s how paid search works. You pay Google to send visitors to your website, and how much you pay is based on how many other people are competing for those same searchers.

Research from MarketingSherpa and Enquiro show that 75 percent of searchers click the organic listings while 25 percent click on the paid results.

A recent study shows that Google’s first page captures over 89 percent of the traffic.

Even within the first page, the traffic is not spread evenly — the top-ranked result (number one on the first page) captures about 42 percent of the traffic.

Google does two basic things. First, it crawls the Internet looking for web pages, storing these pages in its index. Think of the Google index as a massive catalog (much like a library would have a catalog of every book). Second, it has software that processes user searches and finds the best matching web pages from its index.

Getting web pages indexed by Google is not the problem. Getting them to rank well is where the challenge is.

Ranking is based on a combination of two things, relevance and authority. The relevance is a measure of how close of a match a given web page is to the term being searched. This is based on factors such as the title tag (sometimes called the “page title”), the page content, and the anchor text of links to the page. The authority of a page is a measure of how important and authoritative that given page is in the eyes of Google.

The authority of a web page is at the heart of the Google algorithm. The idea behind PageRank is brilliantly simple and based on work at Stanford University on how to measure the credibility and importance of academic papers. The authority of a web page is calculated based on the number of inbound links from other web pages and the authority of those pages.

The first step in search engine optimization is deciding which keywords to optimize your site for. Three primary criteria go into selecting the right keywords to optimize your website: relevance, volume, and difficulty.

When crafting your list of possible keywords, it is best to think from the prospect’s perspective. The amount of traffic you will drive to your website is dependent on how many people search on that keyword.

Difficulty. This is a measure of how hard it will be to rank for the keyword, based on the strength of the competition and your own website’s authority.

A very effective way to know how your customers might search for you is to watch them. If you have an existing website that gets traffic from Google, you can use analytics software to see what terms visitors are already using to get to your site.

When you run a PPC campaign, you can pick a set of keywords and begin generating traffic almost immediately.

The purpose of inbound marketing is not just to get more traffic to your website, but to convert more of that traffic into qualified leads and customers.

Here are four tips on writing great page titles:

Put your most important keywords in your Page Title.
Earlier words in the Page Title carry more weight than later words, so put your most important words first.
Don’t forget the humans! The goal is not just to rank for your important keywords, but to actually have visitors click through to your website.
When picking the Page Title tag for your home page, consider putting your company name at the end of the title.

Here are three tips for writing your page descriptions: Keep them short (one to two sentences) and no more than 160 characters, because Google truncates long descriptions. Every page should have a unique description (just like it should have a unique page title). Use your keywords in your description. Google will often show the matching keywords from the search query as bold in the description.

Most modern content management systems will let you customize the URLs for your web pages. You should take advantage of this feature and optimize your URLs from an SEO perspective.

The best domain names are those that are relatively short, unambiguously clear, and memorable.

All important images on your web page should include what is known as an “alt” attribute. This is a special code that allows you to describe an image with text in a way that Google can see it.

The most important off-page factor is inbound links. An inbound link is a link on another web page that points to your page.

With the proliferation of blogs and the comments left on those blogs, Google ran into an issue. Most blog comments allow the commenter to enter a URL that links back to a web page of their choice. To solve this, the “no-follow” attribute was created for links. The no-follow attribute is information within the source code for a page that can be included on a link. When Google sees a link that is marked as a no-follow, it treats this as a signal that the site owner does not wish to pass SEO credit to the target page. Today, most blogs automatically mark all links left within comments as no-follow.

There are four factors that affect link value:

The authority of the page that the link is on.
Whether the link is a no-follow or a do-follow as discussed above.
The number of other links on the page linking to you.
The anchor text of the link. This is the text that the user sees on the page and that is clickable.

SEO experts constantly debate as to what practices are considered white hat versus black hat. In our mind, the big difference is that white-hat SEO helps Google deliver quality results to users by working within existing guidelines. On the other hand, black-hat SEO involves exploiting current limitations in Google’s software to try and trick it into ranking a particular web page that would normally not have ranked.

Here are the techniques you should stay away from when optimizing your site for Google.

Link Farms. A link farm is a group of websites created for the primary purpose of creating a high number of links to a given web page.
Automated Content Generation/Duplication. Google has gotten very good at determining natural content versus content that is computer-generated gibberish with no value.
Keyword Stuffing. This practice involves overpopulating certain portions of a web page with a set of keywords in the hope that it will increase the chances that Google will rank the page for that keyword. Search engines caught on to this trick years ago, and it’s no longer effective.
Cloaking. This tactic involves delivering different website content to Google’s search spider than what is delivered to human users. The usual motivation for this is to send the search engine crawlers content for ranking on a certain term — but send different content to real users.
Hidden Text. This technique hides text on the web page. The idea is to include text so only Google can see it, but humans cannot.
Doorway/Gateway Pages. This practice is similar to the cloaking technique. Instead of dynamically delivering different content to Google, a doorway page involves getting a given page to rank well in Google, but then redirecting human users to a different page.

Tracking your progress in terms of rankings is an important part of SEO — and it’s relatively easy.

Inbound isn’t just about attracting a new audience. It’s also about keeping your current audience actively engaged. LinkedIn understands this need as well as any organization.

When LinkedIn logged its 200 millionth member, instead of issuing a self-congratulatory press release, it congratulated its most influential members. The company e-mailed a note to the previous year’s top 1, 5, and 10 percent most-viewed profiles.

Get Found in Social Media

Why should you care about social media? The answer is the same as why you should care about Google — because it provides a great way to reach and engage potential customers.

You may be wondering what the advantage is of having a presence on a social media site like Facebook when your business already has a regular website. The answer is reach.

What makes Facebook’s reach particularly powerful is its viral aspect. When individual users join your community on Facebook, their friends see an update in their Facebook home pages. This leads to more users joining your community, causing more people to be exposed to your business, and so on.

Having a presence on a social networking site is swiftly becoming as important as having a website. The social media sites are, in a sense, an extension of a traditional website.

Like most social networks, LinkedIn also allows you to connect to others. This information about millions of people, including their connections, is what makes LinkedIn such a powerful tool.

Groups are a very powerful feature of the LinkedIn system. A LinkedIn Group is essentially an online community of people interested in a particular topic (whatever the focus of the group is).

We believe Google + should be part of any social media strategy, alongside Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others. While it may be difficult to quantify the size of the audience you’re reaching, the connection to Google and its search engine alone are reason enough to invest time in building a Google + presence.

Videos are a great way to educate people, so it pays to build a library of short videos that your target audience would find interesting and helpful to their jobs.

Visual Content

For the past few years, prominent speakers, bloggers, and authors have predicted a rise in “brand journalism.” In other words, companies will increasingly employ professional journalists to report on both the organization’s industry as well as broader topics that are likely to interest their buyers. And it turns out, they were right.

Yet with each piece of marketing-produced content, the Internet becomes proportionally “noisier,” and your buyer has incrementally less time to find your signal within all of the web’s noise. This phenomenon has led to a rise in “visual communications,” or design-heavy content that provides a degree of information disproportionate to the amount of time required to consume it. Infographics, animated “explainer” videos, interactive visualizations, and slide presentations that don’t contain a single bullet have emerged to release some of the pressure on the customer’s time.

Because SlideShare’s audience skews professional, the network also integrates with many marketing automation systems. If a marketer inserts a lead capture form into a presentation, SlideShare can import those leads into the organization’s marketing database.

Infographic design, a subset of the larger “data visualization” category, is a specialty within a specialty.

Visual.ly is both a marketplace that matches companies with data visualization professionals (to produce infographics, videos, interactive content, and presentations) as well as a “visual storytelling” community, where this type of content can be published, discovered, discussed, and shared.

Pinterest has been a smash hit social network where people share, curate, and discover images and video by “pinning” them to a pinboard.

Pinterest has become a huge traffic driver — HubSpot, for example, gets more traffic from Pinterest than from Google + — and thus has become an appealing platform for marketers.

Snapchat was created based on a deceptively simple idea: What if you had a photo-sharing app where pictures would vanish a few seconds after you opened them? At a time when people were obsessed with how much they were being tracked online, and concerned about the huge archives of photos and posts that we’re all leaving around for eternity, the idea of a vanishing photo app was perhaps a stroke of genius.

Can you really tell a story in a six-second video clip? You might be surprised by what people have managed do with Vine, the mobile app introduced by Twitter in 2013.

At HubSpot we used Vine to create a unique version of a regular event we call “Ask Me Anything,” where our CMO, Mike Volpe, took questions via Twitter and then responded via six-second Vine clips rather than by typing answers in Twitter. We’ve found that Vine is a great way to develop a deeper, more personal connection with your audience, and to transform silent followers into serious brand evangelists.

Software and Tools as Content

The basis of inbound marketing is the same regardless of the delivery: provide value to build trust before engaging in a marketing or sales transaction. The delivery format, however, needs to differ depending on the strengths of your company.

Take a look around your business. What is something that one or more of your employees do repeatedly to demonstrate value to prospective customers? Automating this action, if possible, is an awesome place to start for your first free marketing tool.

If a tool isn’t working, shut it down. Don’t spend precious marketing and development resources on a project that isn’t working.

When you decide to build a free tool as part of your inbound marketing mix, you also need to create a promotional campaign to support the launch of the tool to the public.

Converting Customers

Convert Visitors into Leads

You now know how to get your website and other content found by your target market using various methods, including how to pull people into your business using blogs, Google, and social media. However, simply getting visitors to your website isn’t enough. You need to convert these visitors into qualified leads and eventually paying customers.

Conversion is the art and science of encouraging site visitors to further engage with your business.

It’s better to provide people with options to engage at whatever level they’re comfortable, from handing over only a name and e-mail address for your e-newsletter to filling out a longer form for a white paper, webinar, or demo.

We describe the four qualities of a killer call-to-action: valuable, easy to use, prominent, and action oriented (VEPA).

Good calls-to-action typically involve giving your users helpful information, to enable them to do their jobs better or help them become more valuable to a future employer.

How you should consider your calls-to-action:

They should be clear and simple (few words) and should indicate what action to take and the result of that action.
What can you do to ensure that your offers are prominent? Placement on the page is critical. The call-to-action should sit near the top of the page. The call-to-action should also be a clickable image with a relatively large font — versus a text link buried amid page clutter.
Every page on your site should have a call-to-action, not just your home page and landing pages, and the calls-to-action should be context sensitive.
Your call-to-action should begin with a verb and tell the visitor what action to take. One of the lowest converting calls-to-action is “Contact Us.”
Every contact e-mail address on your site should be replaced with a short web form.

In order to maximize your prospect-to-lead-conversion percentage, it is important that you test multiple calls-to-action with different VEPA (valuable, easy to use, prominent, and action oriented) emphasis.

It’s important that you track the percentage of visitors who convert into qualified leads over time.

Convert Prospects into Leads

The landing page is the final step in converting a visitor to a lead.

A good landing page can convert 50 percent of its visitors into qualified leads while a poor one will convert less than 1 percent.

It’s important that you match the content on your landing page with the content on your call-to-action as precisely as possible.

Your landing page has one function only: to get people to fill out your form!

Every person who fills out a call-to-action on your site should be permanently captured and nurtured.

Keep your forms simple and short by asking only the most important questions, such as name and e-mail address, and if the person is in the market for your product or services.

If you ask for sensitive information, such as a Social Security numbers or company revenues, you’ll dramatically lower your conversion rates.

Do not ask your prospects questions that require them to go elsewhere to find the information.

Thinking and research equals lower conversion rates.

Configure your site so that you can track every page prospect’s visit, every comment they make on your blog, and the company for whom they work.

The biggest problem most companies face is not converting more visitors to leads, but rather getting more visitors in the first place.

You need to track a few metrics regarding every landing page, such as visitors, conversions, and resulting conversion rate.

As a rule of thumb, you should be getting at least 15 percent of the people who come to a landing page to convert and fill out the form.

Convert Leads to Customers

Not all inbound leads are created equal. They don’t all close at a higher rate, faster, or with less effort than outbound leads. Depending on your business and your product/service, some inbound leads can close in as little as 15 minutes while others can take three to six months or more (this is especially true for B2B, where the sales cycle is much longer). It’s important, then, to measure not just the quantity of leads, but the quality of your inbound leads in order to determine the effectiveness of your marketing and to allocate your time following up on your best leads.

To measure the quality of leads, you’ll need to somehow grade them, with the higher value leads getting a better grade.

The following are some of the factors that can go into the calculation of the lead grade.

Referral Channel. How did the lead find you?
Website Visits. Did the lead just visit your website once, or did they visit it many times? Did they visit recently or was it months ago? Did they look at specific web pages indicating that they’re further along in the buying process?
Calls-to-Action Taken. Usually, a visitor becomes a lead by completing some call-to-action (such as completing a lead form).
Form Responses. On your lead forms, you often ask a series of questions.

All of these factors can be combined into a predictive formula that calculates the lead grade based on the available data.

Nurturing Your Leads Based on the grade, some leads are qualified and ready to be handed to sales for follow-up. Other leads may not yet be ready to buy.

The idea behind lead nurturing is to maintain ongoing communication and dialog with these leads so that when they’re ready to buy, your product is at the top of their minds.

The information that you send through your lead nurturing program should be useful and always include a compelling call-to-action.

The problem most companies have is getting more leads, not sorting through the leads they have by grading and nurturing them.

Make Better Decisions

Make Better Marketing Decisions

On average, inbound marketing leads are 61 percent less expensive than outbound marketing leads.

The first step in creating your funnel is coming up with a list of sources/campaigns/inputs at the top of your funnel that create prospects for your products and services.
The second step of your funnel. Let’s call this the leads stage for lack of a better term.
After you have figured out the lead stage definition, you then determine the definition of the third stage of the funnel, which we’ll call the opportunity stage.
The last level in the funnel is the “customer” step — someone who has purchased your product or service.

Now that you have your levels (prospect, lead, opportunity, customer), you measure the size of each level on a quarterly (or monthly) basis.

The key piece of information you get from this exercise is the shape (ratios) of the funnel per campaign/channel.

You should also determine ROI (return on investment) per channel.

The campaign yield and ROI information should influence which items you cross off the bottom of your marketing to-do list, and which tactics should get additional resources.

Picking and Measuring Your People

The following is a suggested framework, called DARC, for hiring and developing inbound marketing savvy employees.

D = Hire Digital Citizens
A = Hire for Analytical Chops
R = Hire for Web Reach
C = Hire Content Creators

In this new era of inbound marketing, it’s important that you hire Digital Citizens, not Digital Tourists.

In the era of inbound marketing, it’s become just as important for marketers to have a Rolodex, but not the same type of Rolodex as a salesperson’s. This new type of Rolodex is called Web Reach.

General Electric CEO Jack Welch. He had four criteria he used for evaluating talent at GE:

Energy — Individuals with energy love to “go, go, go.”
Energizers — These people know how to spark others to perform.
Edge — People with edge are competitive types.
Execute — This is the key to the entire model. Without measurable results, the other E’s are of little use.

Watching Your Competition

Jim Cash. Jim is a former professor at Harvard Business School. He said that the top CEOs were all a little bit paranoid. What Jim had to say is consistent with what legendary Intel CEO Andy Grove said in his book titled Only the Paranoid Survive.

The web is a flattener of all marketplaces — it is the ultimate meritocracy. Because the web makes it so much more efficient to spread ideas, it poses a great opportunity for upstarts with unique new products or services, so you should be more paranoid now than you have ever been because you have never been so vulnerable!

It is important to get a baseline of how you are doing relative to your competitors once, but even more important to get a baseline of how you are doing relative to your competitors over time.

On Commitment, Patience, and Learning

In order to get maximum value from inbound marketing in the form of leads, you need to stick your leg in the water for a couple of months to start, not stick your toe in the water for a couple of days. The benefits come very slowly at first, but they accumulate until you reach successive tipping points.