Ep. 11 Inbound Marketing

Josh Rich, Create the Movement

Brad Post, Create the Movement

 

Josh Rich, Create the Movement: Good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us for Create the Movement podcast. I’m Josh Rich. With me is Brad Post.

Brad Post, Create the Movement: How’s it going Josh?

J: Doing great Brad. How are you?

B: I’m doing well.

J: Excellent.

B: So, today we are to be speaking about inbound marketing. Is that right?

J: Correct.

B: Okay.

J: Inbound marketing. So, for starters, to define the term inbound marketing, seems a lot of people probably don’t know what that is. It sounds kind of strange. The biggest difference between inbound marketing and traditional marketing is that traditional marketing is what you’d see on TV ads or magazine ads. The advertiser interrupting the viewer’s life to promote their product or service.

B: Kind of shoving it in people’s faces?

J: Right. Exactly.

B: Whether you want to see it or not.

J: It sounds bad, but that’s what it is. They are shouting a message out and waiting for the person to respond.

B: Okay.

J: Inbound marketing is a different approach to that. It waits for the viewer to come to it.

B: Okay.

J: It’s not interruptive. This is stuff like blogs, or YouTube videos, or anything that the consumer would seek out for their own benefit, but it’s actually marketing material.

B: Would actually click, or press “PLAY”, or read.

J: Exactly. Anything that they would look at, read, watch, share would be considered inbound marketing.

B: Okay.

J: Email campaigns are kind of a hybrid of inbound and traditional.

B: Okay.              

J: The advantage is that is the consumer is already looking for information on whatever topic or product or service. So, they’re coming to you as somewhat of a warm lead.

B: Right.

J: As opposed to just throwing it in their face and hoping something sticks – as traditional marketing does. That’s a pretty big advantage, that they’re actually seeking it out, and not just, kind of unexpectedly getting hit in the face with it. So, that’s why there’s been a pretty big shift, as of recent, toward inbound marketing. It seems to be a little more effective if you can do it. It’s a little harder to do. It’s harder to create content. It’s harder to find the topics that people are looking for. But, it is pretty good. So, that’s kind of this fundamental shift. Where we saw the Mad Men-days of advertising, that was very much like telling the consumer what they wanted. Versus now, when we’re trying to educate them, as opposed to selling to them.

B: Right. Because people are searching differently than they have in the past.

J: Exactly.

B: They’re asking Google questions. They’re asking Siri questions.

J: Exactly. That’s kind of an overview of what inbound marketing is, and why we’re switching to that. As we look at that, there’s two major aspects we want to look at when we’re considering a strategy for inbound marketing.

First, is knowing your consumer. And so, whatever industry you’re in, whatever you’re selling, or service you’re offering, you need to know why your consumer would be interested in your company. There’s a couple of things you can do for that. First, if have a good consumer base already, a great thing to do is to come up with a survey. And figure out what they do, how they tick, why they chose you over a different service. So, that way you can capitalize on that. You need to know different behavior patterns, how they search for things in Google. Or, what they search for. What social media they’re on. That’s going to be a big part of that. That’s the foundation. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, then you don’t know how to talk.

The second thing, that you want to consider is your content. Content is absolutely essential to inbound marketing. In fact, content marketing and inbound marketing are used synonymously, which they shouldn’t be. But somewhat the same thing. Content can be anything. As we said earlier, it could be a blog; it could be a YouTube video; it could be whatever.

B: Could be a podcast?

J: Yeah! It could be a podcast. Whatever you think that your consumers are going to be searching for. Whatever media they are most likely to look at, or view or share.

B: Okay.

J: Those are the two things you really want to focus on. The biggest thing on content is you have to make it relevant. It needs to be relevant and relatable to what the consumer is looking for. Sometimes, that’s kind of hard to do if you have a “drier” industry. If you sell janitorial supplies, that’s going to be tricky to find out what your consumer base is looking for.

B: Right.

J: Or, if you have something a little more dynamic like a restaurant, or some sort of athletic apparel, that’s going to be a little more fun to do. So, that’s where knowing your target audience really comes in handy. Because that’s where all the information is going to come from. Once you have all of that, you can roll it all together, and leverage it, and work it out.

There are some great tools that can help you do this. HubSpot’s one. Infusionsoft. Are there any more you can think of Brad?

B: We’re looking into a few others, but I can’t name them off the top of my head. But yeah, I think Infusionsoft and HubSpot.

J: Those are probably the two big ones. That’s where I got a lot of my information – HubSpot. But, they are expensive. So, if you are going to get into it, know that it’s not cheap. But I think once you set things up, it kind of pays for itself. Everything is expensive in marketing, whether traditional or inbound.

B: Exactly. So, the three things are knowing your client, your target audience, we’ve talked about that in the past. Knowing who they are. And then coming up with the content to target those people. And then making sure that content is relevant.

J: Exactly.

B: Correct?

J: Yeah.

B: And it seems like a lot of the content we see, of course we’re searching marketing materials and stuff like that. They try to make it visually attractive, as well, with images or different cartoons or whatnot.

J: Yeah. Like infographics – a big thing that happened in the past couple of years as far as content is concerned. People like looking at that in a new way.

I would recommend not sticking with just one form of content. Change it up. Do animation videos. Do in-person videos at your desk. It doesn’t have to be fancy.

B: Right.

J: Especially, if it’s purely informational, or like a how-to. People are willing to see a low-quality video for a how-to video. As long as it’s good information.

B: Right.

J: The other day I was fixing my toilet, and I Googled how to fix it.

B: I’ve done it before too!

J: And the top video was like this total Guido-guy from Staten Island.

B: Had the butt crack, right?

J: Yeah, it was like straight out of the nineties. And that was the top, most-watched video. Because it was good.

B: I think I’ve seen it.

J: It was five minutes long. It told you how to do it. And it was quick. So that just shows that content is more important than show. You know?

B: Right.

J: If it’s good information. If it’s presented in a good way. People are somewhat willing to put up with lower quality. Quality is important, too, if you’re getting into a sales-y thing. But just for informational, you don’t have to have some really fancy camera, or really fancy setup. You can do it.

B: I like the survey idea, too. Because, like you said, a company that sells janitorial supplies, they’ve got a clientele. Ask that clientele specific questions, and it will help you know how to write your content.

J: Right.

B: Make it relevant to what they’re looking for.

J: You need to know what your clients are looking for. What they want.

B: Absolutely. Anything else Josh?

J: That’s it for now.

B: All right. Join us for our next edition of Create the Movement podcast.