Tag Archives: Mike Volpe

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5 Insights from HubSpot’s The State of Inbound Marketing 2010 Webinar

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Number 5 

HubSpot conducted a webinar on February 18th titled: The State of Inbound Marketing 2010. The webinar focused on key trends in inbound and outbound marketing uncovered from a survey HubSpot conducted in early 2010.  Hubspot's analysis reveals many insights on how businesses are using inbound marketing to reinvent and improve their marketing strategies. This is great content so I've posted the slides in case you didn't have the opportunity to attend the webinar.

The State of Inbound Marketing 2010

Mike Volpe (VP Marketing @HubSpot) and Adam Blake (MIT-Sloan MBA Student) presented many thoughtful insights.  Here are some golden nuggets that really hit home:

Insight 1 – Cost Per Lead for Inbound Marketing Channels is Significantly Lower Versus Outbound Marketing Channels
(Slide 5) Inbound marketing channels (i.e., social media, blogs, SEO – organic / natural search, PPC – paid search / Adwords) cost per lead averaged around $134.  Outbound marketing channels (i.e., telemarketing, trade shows, direct mail) cost per lead averaged around $332 per lead.  Thus, inbound marketing lowered costs per lead by 60%.

Insight 2 – Almost All Inbound Marketing Channels Generate Lower Costs Compared to Any Outbound Channel
(Slides 6, 7) 63% rated social media and blogs as "below average cost" for generating leads.  43% rated SEO as "below average cost."  In addition, these three inbound marketing channels performed better than all outbound marketing channels.  In slide 7, Mike observed that the outbound channel 2010 results for "below average cost" were better than 2009 for all categories.  He noted customers are probably negotiating better terms due to current economic conditions (e.g., a short-term benefit).

Insight 3 - Social Media is One Component of a Healthy Inbound Marketing Mix
(Slide 8) The lesson here: Don't put all your eggs in one basket.  Although respondents rated social media as their most important source of leads, SEO and blogs rated second and third respectively.  In fact, SEO was rated only 1% lower than social media (i.e., 59% to 60%). 

Successful Google results via organic search will continue to be important.  The eMarketer article, Organic Search Still Reigns, reinforces why landing on the first page results of Google, Yahoo!, and Bing is huge.  The rationale: 95% of search-referred traffic comes from first-page results.  Less than 2% of search-referred traffic comes from visitors willing to keep looking after the second page of results.

Insight 4 - Blog Post Frequency Significantly Impacts Customer Acquisition
(Slides 16, 17) Most respondents said they blog primarily once per week.  However, the firms most successful at customer acquisition were those who blogged more (i.e., two to three times per week, daily, multiple times per day). 
Mike and Adam think this is a result of gaining more experience in blogging.  When a firm blogs more frequently, it gets better at writing.  This yields better content which attracts more site traffic (and firms begin investing more time in their company blog).  When HubSpot was a smaller firm, Mike noted it blogged once per week.  When the firm started growing, their blogging frequency increased and they now create blog posts on a daily basis.

Insight 5 - Smaller Companies Implement Inbound Marketing (Larger Firms Not So Much)
(Slide 13) 44% of smaller firms utilize inbound marketing (versus 32% for larger firms).  Mike and Adam cited how smaller firms have more limited marketing budgets (i.e., many are start-ups).  In addition, the larger firms are more established, and they probably achieved their status through outbound marketing.
Insight #5 doesn't surprise me.  It makes sense why smaller firms would look to blogging, social media, and organic search as natural marketing vehicles.  The biggest expense is the investment and prioritization of time to inbound activities.  For the larger firms, I think they look at inbound marketing as additional channels to augment traditional marketing activity.
Check out this blog post: The Fortune 500 and Social Media by Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross from reputationXchange.com.  It provides some great statistics and data on social media adoption (or lack therof) by the largest US corporations.
What do you think of these findings?  Do these results surprise you?  Please comment and let me know what you think.

Photo Credit: By psd via Flickr

 

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Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah Levels the Marketing Playing Field

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J0105220[1] I am a huge fan of HubSpot and its founders, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah.  Their team members, Mike Volpe and Rebecca Corliss, generously share outstanding content and services (i.e., Inbound Marketing University) to help all marketing professionals continuously improve and reinvent their marketing skills.  This organization is the epitome of a social media core value: “It is always better to give than to receive.”

 Inbound Marketing Book Cover Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs is an outstanding and practical marketing strategy guide targeted to small and startup businesses.  Halligan and Shah have written this book with small and startup businesses in mind because their book shares numerous insights from their own experiences as entrepreneurs (i.e., Tips from the Trenches).

The Value of This Book.  Inbound Marketing makes a convincing case that marketing success is not limited by the size of our respective marketing budgets.  Instead, these limits are now a function of our own creativity and investment of time.  Inbound Marketing practically explains how small or startup businesses can practically and effectively compete with larger competitors by executing:

* Social media strategy via channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
* A lead nurturing and conversion process
* A sales marketing funnel process to measure campaign ROI


Inbound Marketing Versus Outbound Marketing

What’s Inbound Marketing?   Halligan explains the differences between Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing in this blog post: Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing.

Outbound Marketing = Traditional, “Push / Interruption-Based” Marketing.  The marketer pushes the message out far and wide hoping that it resonates far and wide with the target consumer.

Outbound Marketing tactics include:

  • Trade shows
  • Seminar series
  • Email blasts to purchased lists
  • Internal cold calling
  • Outsourced telemarketing
  • Advertising

Inbound Marketing = “Pull” Marketing Leveraging the Internet.  Any marketing tactic that relies on earning people’s interest instead of buying it.  Inbound marketing focuses on helping yourself “get found” by people already learning about and shopping in your industry. 

Inbound Marketing tactics include: 

  • Search engines
  • Blogs
  • Social media sites

The Inbound Marketing Process Transformation.  Three (3) business activities provide foundation for marketing transformation:

  1. Getting found online
  2. Converting visitors and leads
  3. Analyzing and improving

 

The 6 Practical Benefits of Studying Inbound Marketing

1. Understanding how/why Google plays a signifcant role in your marketing success.  Here, Inbound Marketing explains in non-technical terms why inbound links (e.g., links from other websites that connect to your site or blog) play a vital role in your website’s  “Google Juice” or Google Authority (e.g., the number of inbound links to your web pages and the authority of those pages linking to your site).

2. Executing practical and actionable “to-do” lists at the end of every chapter.  The suggestions are hardly rocket science but they require personal commitment, preseverance, and time.

3. Learning social media marketing tactics for use across all major social media channels.  Halligan and Shah ably provide specific examples on how to effectively deploy blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, and YouTube.

4. Measuring the effectiveness of your social media marketing initiatives by channel.  For example, the book guides you on how to compare the effectiveness of a Twitter campaign versus a YouTube campaign.

5. Implementing a lead nurturing process in all marketing campaigns.  Why is this important?  Every prospect is at a different place in the buying cycle for your particular product or service.  Therefore, you want this prospect to have your organization at the “top-of-mind” even when they’re not ready to buy from you (because one day they will be).

6. Informing marketing decisions (e.g., ROI) by creating a sales marketing funnel process.  This process will enable your organization to measure and evaluate campaign yield along with ROI.

 

The 3 Audiences Who Will Benefit from Studying Inbound Marketing 

1. Amateur Bloggers.  You will learn how to build Google Authority for your blog by understanding why you don’t want your blog’s URL address to include the name of your blogging platform.  For example, if your blog’s URL address is www.myblogname.typepad.com or www.myblogname.wordpress.com that’s not good.  Make sure to address this problem — I did and my search engine results are all the better for it.

2. Marketing Professionals (especially CMOs).  You will make better marketing decisions by creating a sales marketing funnel so you can measure campaign effectiveness per channel using campaign yield and ROI measurement techniques.

3. CEOs.  You will learn how to monitor your competitor’s activity and progress by tracking seven (7) attributes.  These attributes can be tracked using free tools on the Internet.  These attributes or tools are:

* Website Grade via WebsiteGrader.com
* Number of Delicious.com bookmarks
* Number of inbound links
* Number of Facebook fans
* Website traffic via Compete.com
* Google Buzz of your brand name relative to a competitor’s brand name

If you’ve read Inbound Marketing, please leave me a comment and let me know what you thought of the book.  I’m curious to know what you found helpful or valuable.

 

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