How Inbound Marketing Works
How much time do you spend on inbound marketing?
As mentioned in the previous blog post about inbound marketing, one of the core tasks of inbound marketing is content creation.
The central component of inbound marketing is content creation. This could mean anything from writing a blog post, having posts and conversation on Twitter or another microblogging service, interacting on groups and pages on Facebook, or creating and administering a page on Facebook. Perhaps it’s creating a video cast or podcast. Content creation can be further narrowed down into two more categories:
- Tasks that are initial and time-consuming but not ongoing. Examples might include creating a custom landing page, writing SEO metadata for your website and doing keyword research for your static pages. Writing static page web copy is another example. These tasks take a long time but then they stop. It may be a full time job for a month, but when you’re done, the time commitment lessens – though it’s not totally over.
- Community management – Writing frequent blog posts, responding to comments, commenting on other’s blogs, interacting and engaging with the twitterati, update your Facebook status, comment on linked in groups, etc.
Another important concern is data analysis. Sure, you have written copy for your website and have metadata. Yes, your Facebook page has a beautiful landing tab with conversion form. The design work is done. But is it doing its job? Are you doing A/B testing to test the effectiveness of your landing page? Are you using your analytics tools to track conversions? Are there new searches and keywords to consider optimizing for? A few hours a week need to be devoted to analyzing and constantly tweaking your content. Perhaps your website still says © 2005 – or worse. Have you updated this?
One of the core content hubs is a blog. A recent post by HubSpot on the fast evolution of SEO makes essential point both about the SEO and lead-generation benefits of blogging and on the time commitment that content creation takes.
What is the most important thing an SMB can do to improve organic traffic?
A Blog. Period.
Write content, have others write content and make it engaging and relevant, then the links will come. I Can’t even begin to tell you the potential here, if you are willing to engage for a few hours a week.
What’s the point? Content creation takes TIME!
The amount of time required in content creation is often underestimated. Yet, inbound marketing practioners say that the amount of time (remember, this is a general rule – it could take less or more time depending on your specific task) is at least two hours daily.
Chris Brogan writes (“How much time should I spend on social media?”) that “2 hours a day is a minimum for MOST efforts.” Matt Dickman of Fleishman-Hillard agrees (“The two hour minimum“) with Chris Brogan. He set the “two hour minimum per day” rule.
Two hours a day? Just to go update Facebook and go on Twitter and do all this unimportant social media stuff is TWO HOURS A DAY? Really? What do you do with the two hours? Chris Brogan and Matt Dickman divide it up differently but the core is: listen, listen some more, interact, engage!
This is how Chris Brogan divides up his time:
- 1/4 for Listening – Start your day by listening and finding what the world is saying about you, your competitor, your marketplace, etc. Need help with listening? See grow bigger ears. In this space, I also count reading (reading other people’s blogs and other online materials).
- 1/2 for Commenting/Communicating – Spend time commenting and replying back to people on the various channels where they reach you. If that’s Twitter, email, or wherever you hang out, fine. In the commenting timeframe, I also include sharing. Be sure to tweet links to great articles, use StumbleUpon, Delicious, Facebook share, and all the other various tools that help people find the good stuff. In Google reader, a simple SHIFT-S gives an article a whole lot of new potential fans. In here, I might also add the act of linking in and connecting with people on various networks.
- 1/4 for Creating – Your efforts in content creation are every bit as important as your connectivity and communication. This might include blogging, making video or audio, creating email newsletters, and anything else you’re building to contribute something to the space. It might be posting those event photos in Flickr and on Facebook. Whatever it is, creating content of some kind should take up 1/4 of your social media efforts, as this is the way you get found. Search engines thrive on new content. Humans seek out new material. The more you can be helpful, the better your opportunities.
Dickard divides his time up similarly.
Listen – Check your feed reader, check your Google alerts, monitor Tweetdeck, do a Twitter search (unless you’ve added them into your reader), check Technorati (you never know), look at your commenting service (co.Comment/Backtype/etc.) to see who has replied to you. This isn’t a one-time thing, set a schedule through the day and check back for 5 minutes.
Engage – Monitor those conversations through the day and reply as close to realtime as you can. Overnight delays are common and (I think) accepted in most cases. During the workday, however, you can make more impact by replying within 2-4 hours. If you have a blog, write a post or at least brainstorm new ideas based on what you’re seeing.
Discover – Another part of the day should spawn from the listening and engagement phases. You should constantly look for new blogs, people on Twitter to follow, new relevant posts to comment on, etc.
How long do you spend on your inbound marketing tasks? How do you divide them up?
Inbound Marketing – It's Not Just Social
What is digital marketing? Is it just social media marketing? NO! When looking at marketing today, a better way to look at things is to look at the old way of doing things — outbound marketing — and compare that with the new way: inbound marketing.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound Marketing is NOT social media. Social media is one component of Inbound Marketing
How does inbound marketing differ from outbound marketing?
Outbound marketing is “traditional, old-style” marketing. It is:
- Flyers
- Sales calls (cold calling — you know, those annoying sales calls that always come at dinnertime!)
- Junk mail
- Anything that is directed out at you, that you didn’t seek out
Inbound marketing is about getting found by customers. It includes:
- Creating videos that customers want to see
- Writing blog posts and maintaining a blog that talks about subjects that people want to see, subscribe to, read, and interact and engage with
- Participating in the conversation about your brand and its principals on microblogging and social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
- Creating useful content that people want to read and engage with
There are three key components of inbound marketing. They are:
- Content: This is the substance of any inbound marketing campaign
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): This makes it easier for your potential customers to find your content. Today, content isn’t king but rather optimized content is king.
- Social Media: Amplifies content
As you can see, social media’s sole purpose is to amplify and promote the optimized content that is being created in the first two components. Most of an inbound marketing campaign’s time should be spent on content creation and not sending content via social media. We will shortly post on how much time is required on a daily basis for anyone who wants to engage in inbound marketing.
According to HubSpot, “When your content is distributed across and discussed on networks of personal relationships, it becomes more authentic and nuanced, and is more likely to draw qualified customers to your site”
What a successful inbound marketing campaign looks like
HubSpot is one of my favorite online marketing and web analytics companies frequently blogs about inbound marketing. In one of their recent posts, they answer a question that we are often asked by clients: What does success look like? How do you measure success? While analytics, traffic, and sales are an important end result of success, this does not happen by magic. One of my favorite quotes is from wine guru and business guru Gary Vaynerchuk: “Viral is not strategy. Viral is an outcome.”
But what needs to be done in order to get to that outcome? How does a company need to transform itself in order to achieve inbound marketing success? It’s actually a fairly intense process that requires organizational buy in and a different organizational structure than previously needed. Hubspot’s blog post “What does an Inbound Marketing transformation look like?” does a good job in addressing this issue.
Content Creation
You already know you need to create content to be a successful inbound marketer, but if you’ve transformed your company, it might look a little different than you expect.
- Marketing team is managing the blog – Maybe they’re writing a few blog posts or producing some videos, but primary responsibility for content creation isn’t in their laps any more. Instead…
- Bloggers come from other departments – If you’re a software company, your product managers and engineers are blogging. If you’re a consulting company, your consultants are producing all kinds of content.
- The executive team is watching your blog analytics – Why? Well, your blog is allowing you to get found, so they care. They also want to make sure that you’re getting good ROI from the time folks are spending producing content.
Sales
Maybe it was tough to get the sales team’s buy-in at first (especially since you might be making them blog!), but now they’re complete inbound marketing converts. Why?
- They don’t cold-call any more – Every lead they get has already been to your website or interacted with your company.
- They know what leads want – They’ve checked all the available reports and know exactly which pages of your website their lead has visited.
- They know when leads are thinking about you – It’s not magic, it’s an email alert they get when a lead comes back to your site.
Public Relations
Maybe you’ve gotten rid of your traditional PR department by now, but, at minimum, its functions look wildly different.
- The PR folks are all about social media – Their Twitter Grade is 99+, and they’re completely aware of every single time your brand is mentioned.
- Everyone in the company does some PR – The gist of your social media policy is “use common sense”, and everyone is encouraged to Tweet, Facebook, & blog responsibly.
- Press releases fit into SEO strategy – Press releases are written to specifically align with link-building and keyword-targeting strategies. The era of vomiting how cool you are all over the place is over.
The Executive Suite
This is probably the best measure of how tranformed your company is. Your executives buy into inbound marketing and pay attention.
- ROI ROI ROI – And have we mentioned ROI? They care about how you’re spending your time and energy, and appreciate that they understand the ROI they get from inbound marketing.
- Transparency – They’re aware of (and care about) your social media presence and your blog. They’ve even been known to write a post or three themselves.
- They’re true believers – Sure, they were skeptical at first, but now your executives have become obsessed with seeing where your leads come from on a high level. They love inbound marketing and give you active suggestions on your next content creation effort.
Does your company look like this yet? What might you have to do to get there?