Why Change Selling Blog

This month marks the second anniversary as HubSpot Inbound Marketing customers and the following is a review of what we have achieved and learned in our second year.

We signed up for the HubSpot Inbound Marketing platform halfway through the product demonstration, when we realized that it exactly fulfilled our lead generation requirements and perhaps more importantly had the potential to fulfill the lead generation needs of most of our clients.

If you are interested in our first year experience please visit HubSpot-Inbound-Marketing-Performance-Review-Year-1. If you are interested in how we did in our third year, visit our HubSpot Year 3 Performance review.

Prior to HubSpot we had a second generation "presence" Website of about thirty pages for our consulting and training business, but we did not receive any inbound leads from the Website, although we were creating content monthly for magazine placement and did see a small traffic spike with every article we published.
We updated our sales and marketing methodology by replacing our old outbound lead generation methods with HubSpot and their Inbound Marketing Methodology and our lead generation process is dependent on it today.
Since we started with HubSpot we have generated over 220 leads (a lead is defined as a visitor who exchanges their contact details in return for viewing a joint AMC-HubSpot Webinar, downloading our WhiteboardSelling whitepaper or signing up for a free Marketing Messaging Alignment Consultation.)

Death by PowerPoint is a familiar a phrase that I am sure every reader of this blog has both heard and experienced...well near-death anyway. If you are interested in PowerPoint best practices you can read a blog I wrote earlier this year.

Big news this month at HubSpot is the integration between HubSpot's Inbound Marketing platform and Shopify's e-commerce platform.

Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as "the wrongful appropriation, close imitation, or purloining and publication, of another author's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions, and the representation of them as one's own original work." (source Wikipedia)

CSO Insights is a specialist sales and marketing consulting firm and creators of the annual Sales Performance Optimization survey.

I spoke with a prospective client this week in the marketing services business and after a brief introduction she expressed her frustration, "We’re doing all this marketing 2.0 stuff, but we're not getting in the door".
Prior to the call I ran a Marketing Grader report and her Website scored above 65% in all three areas of all sites graded for Inbound Marketing potential by HubSpot's Marketing Grader.
The crux of the problem is that you can be doing all this Marketing 2.0 stuff and still failing if you're off target in your messaging and out of sync. with market and using sub-optimal practices.
In this case, the marketing services business is transforming rapidly from the old interrupt driven model of push-marketing, advertising and PR placement, to the opt-in, inbound marketing model of content creation, social networking and community building, underpinned by analysis and testing.

The issues that surfaced during our conversation are common symptoms of the structural change in this sector and they are summarized below;–

• No-one's reading our email newsletters,
• Cold calling is a simply not effective and we're not getting any voicemail callbacks,
• We have a WordPress Blog, but no-one is reading it,
• Our referrals and word of mouth leads have dried up,
• We have a Twitter and Facebook account; what a waste of time!,
• We have inquiry and registration forms on our Website, but we're not getting any leads,
• I fired all the sales guys and now it's me calling and I suck at it.
• No-one has ever heard of us, despite the fact that we advertise, spend a healthy sum on Google AdWords and have been in business for 10 years.

The above list may be familiar in many companies who have embraced the tools of Inbound Marketing without a cohesive strategy and a realistic view of the road ahead.
As a consulting firm specializing in helping companies transform from the Old World to the Inbound Marketing model, this conversation is familiar and happily we have clients who will vouch for the sequence of events and methodology we recommend. The other major consideration is that all of the tools in the marketing 2.0 mix need be integrated and made to work together...or productivity will be an issue.
The answers to the following basic questions should serve to focus inbound marketing efforts;

1. What is a lead worth and how many leads do you need to produce a year, based on your conversion ratios to hit your revenue goals?
2. Who is your target audience, who are the buyer persona's you wish to engage?
3. How will you reach your target audience, where do they hang out online?
4. In what areas can the agency claim thought leadership; how does the agency create unique value for clients, how does this connect to your brand?
5. What are the major marketing messaging themes that will resonate with buyers and what keywords do you want to rank for on Page 1 of Google?
6. What is the goal of the email newsletter, how will you track conversions and improve performance?
7. What is the goal of the Website and in particular, what is the goal of the home page?
8. Have you created compelling content that can be easily shared, downloaded or viewed in exchange for contact details?
9. Have you created calls to action that lead to high quality landing pages with compelling offers? ("A Contact Us" page tends to collect more SPAM than leads)
10. Is there a blogging platform to amplify thought leadership, that integrates with the main Website, with hyperlinks to and from main Website pages, where content is easily shared....or is the blog stranded, lost Robinson Crusoe style in the vast ocean of the Internet?
11. How will you nurture prospective customers that do register as leads, but are not yet ready to buy?

Take-aways

To make this marketing 2.0 stuff, (Inbound Marketing) work, you need the following

• Clear messaging to engage your target audience,
• Proven inbound marketing methodology,
• A toolset that's integrated and productive, that enables small agencies to compete with the big boys,
• Inbound marketing training for Marketing Agencies, (which can be found for free),
• Consistent input, ongoing analysis and optimization, a strategy to drive it and top down commitment to making it happen,
• Easy access to a trusted, skilled talent-pool and services marketplace, to leverage in-house skills.

"We have just spent $25,000 on an SEO project and we don't have the budget right now!"
I have heard this sales objection a couple of times in the past year
from prospects in discussion around providing inbound marketing strategy and services (we are a certified HubSpot partner) and I was going to write a post and share some lessons learned.

In preparing to research this article I ran a number of searches and Google'd up the phrase "SEO is not a one off event" as it perfectly encapsulates the sentiment of the article I was planning to write.  A couple of clicks later I came across an excellent article on SEOMoz from 16 year old Fryed7 entitled "The definitive guide to awesome Web content".

This is a long, but excellent article and well worth the 5 minutes or so it will take to read, more if you follow all the links....and maybe you will want to watch the 17 minute Seth Godin video on TED on building Tribes.

I love Ed Fry's jet engine metaphor (an original thought) and although Ed calls it Tribal SEO, in the HubSpot community, creating "manifesto" content is one of corner-stones of Inbound Marketing strategy. Bob Apollo's brilliantly titled blog yesterday social media without thought-leadership is like broadcasting into space echo's this idea.
Take-Aways

• SEO needs to be seen as part of an integrated set of inbound marketing activities, the most important of which is to create interesting and linkworthy content.
• "Definitive content must be remarkable + awesome + white-paper-worthy" states Ed Fry
  
• Beware of false guru's; - anyone can do SEO, but if you are looking for a real guru with great ideas, then Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz is the genuine article.
• Creating remarkable content with keyword rich titles, URL's and headings is half the battle, then spreading the word to a community interested in your ideas via social media will generate inbound links.
• Ed Fry succinctly captures the old vs. new thinking on SEO and the essence of this post.  Instead of “I’m not ranking number 1 - I’ll go and build some links” try “I’m not ranking number 1 - I’ll go and promote manifesto content”
• If your Website is lost on the Internet or you are not getting the results you want from blogging, or need help with creating "manifesto" content to drive inbound traffic, then we would be pleased to discuss.
   

For B2B marketers, quality trumps quantity in lead generation priority and according to a recent Marketing Sherpa poll, generating quality leads is the greatest challenge marketers face.

During recent bathroom renovations I had cause to research the alternatives to replacing the wall-mounted toilets in our 1960's California Ranch style house and became aware that some industries are way behind the curve in reaching consumers around their interests and needs vs. the traditional approach of advertising their products...the plumbing supplies industry for example.

Technology companies come and go, but only a small fraction of 1% of founding teams discover a scalable business model and steer their company to an IPO or acquisition with valuation more than $100 million.