Founder in Eleven

For most founders, marketing decisions are some of the toughest expenses to justify and can be a waste of time and money.  Depending on the go-to market strategy, a company has multiple marketing options, including:

• Vendor shows
• Marketing events
• Advertising
• Cold calling and email marketing

However, these marketing strategies can have the following issues:

• High costs – often times, the cost to market may not always result in  expense-worthy leads
• Too time-consuming – Vendor shows and other events take up time that could be allocated towards other more efficient sales and marketing activities
• Mixed results – Good marketing resources typically are pretty good at marketing to founders about the benefits of their services.  Whether it was an individual, vendor show or advertising plan, I rarely found sources guarantee their results or to be worth the cost/expense.
• Hurting the brand – When it comes to vendor shows and marketing events, the attendees are giving their time and attention with consent.  With cold calling and email marketing, though, there exists a risk to the company brand. These bothersome and unsolicited approaches can make potential clients associate the brand with “that company that calls or emails me too much.” 

Rather than attending or paying for marketing services that reach clients when they may not be looking to buy, Inbound Marketing focuses on having potential customers find the firm when they are in need of the services. 

Inbound Marketing Approach – Giving Away Content to Get Customers

Rather than participate in a physical or virtual event that potential clients might not attend, inbound marketing focuses on creating relevant content for your website that potential customers will be able to find with ease when looking for those services.  This content could include product and services descriptions, blog entries, videos, or whitepapers.  Unlike paid events, which have a start and end time, inbound marketing content:

• Pays dividends over a long period of time since popular articles, whitepapers, and other content can continue to be accessed and attract potential customers (and the search ranking of the web site) far after their initial publishing.
• Exists by themselves for organic search, but can also be added to a Google advertising campaign 
• Can be used as follow-up to sales initiatives, showing off company knowledge and educating potential customers

The process for inbound marketing can be summarized below:

1. Identify what information, particularly terms or phrases, potential customers would search for on the web
2. Create desirable content that satisfies those searches
3. Create additional content that would require a web user to give their email address or other information (i.e. provide consent to further marketing).  The additional content will be emailed to the client and could be in the form of a document or case study
4. Follow up with the web user after they have received the content

As an example, TSG had a very successful practice converting FileNet customers to more modern platforms.  We followed the above methodology by:

• Realizing that more and more clients are searching for “FileNet migration” or “FileNet conversion”
• Creating blog posts, videos, and whitepapers on how to migrate from FileNet to modern platforms.  One of our more successful  posts included “FileNet Migration – How to Retire in Weeks, not Months” that had enticing title combined with actual services advice which established our company expertise.

After a period of time, TSG was able to achieve very high search rankings (1^st organically) with Google and other search engines based on the quality of the videos, articles, and whitepapers.  In 2019, TSG handled its largest FileNet migration for a client that exceeded 7 figures in consulting services; the client found us completely based on our inbound marketing content.

Inbound Marketing – What to Post

While it makes sense to focus posts on topics that have previously led to sales, a successful inbound marketing campaign will also post items that might not focus on sales, rather establish the brand of the website and the quality of information.  Some best practices include:

• Build a strong website – Any inbound marketing initiative needs to start with an up-to-date website that promotes the products and services of the firm.  With luck, leads will land at the website from search or other links.
• Link your content – Linking internally and externally will drive up organic search results.  Keep in mind that all the search engines are smart enough to discover content that is over-linked (link farms), so focus only on relevant links.
• Post often – establish a cadence of “x” blog posts per week.  Leverage the daily huddle by pushing managers to contribute posts.
• Post for short attention spans – I used to have a metric that if I cannot write the post in one train ride from my house to the city (typically an hour), I am putting too much work into it.  Posts should be single-issue focused with whitepapers (that require an email) expanding on additional details. 
• Post for your competitors – This is the hardest to understand, but in looking at who was accessing our content (described later in this article), we often found that it was as much our competitor as it was potential client leads.  While a potential competitor might gain knowledge from the site, the value of connecting with a client was worth giving similar information to a competitor

Of the notes above, a valid response might be “Why should I give this information away, especially to my competitors or clients that won’t engage with us for the product or service?” Embracing the value that content adds to your brand requires giving it away for the long-term benefits achieved for the brand and the organic search results.

Inbound Marketing – Logistics

Most inbound marketing tracking involves leveraging software to monitor the campaign’s success and track potential leads.  Hubspot provides a considerable number of free resources as well as a book that I would recommend reading.  Marketo is another good tool.  Both of these tools provide:

• Track contacts in a CRM (Client Relationship Management)
• Track activity on websites and posts
• Track generic access activity

Tracking contacts is fairly simple and should be a standard part of any CRM initiative.  For normal sales practice, a potential lead is created in the system when introduced to a new potential client.  For inbound marketing, when the lead gives an email address to receive content, the lead is automatically registered in the CRM system with the information they provided.  This CRM access can be used as a reminder to follow-up with contacts. Previously, a cookie would be added to their browser to allow for future monitoring of what content the lead accessed, although with today’s privacy concerns, the ability to track clients has been limited. 

Tracking activity on your website can be accomplished in the CRM tool or other web monitoring tools.  Successful inbound marketing shouldn’t just be about clicks but about clicks that result in leads that result in sales.  Tracking generic access provides for some monitoring of what domains (companies) are accessing the site’s content, but be wary that with more and more people working from home, this metric is probably misleading.