3 Reasons to go Inbound
This Thursday we are celebrating our inbound marketing emergence. This blog was written and published on our old website on 10/15/2014, about three weeks prior to our website launch. We updated it with answers to questions we had and promises we made, added a few links, but kept its core message in tact.
So, join us, business owners, sales and marketing professionals, recruiters, and general enthusiasts. Digital marketing is evolving, and we're going to help you bring a new age of branding development to your business with inbound marketing advice you can take to the bank.
10/15/2014 - Three weeks ago I made the final decision to embark on the Hubspot journey for my marketing company, Orange Pegs Media. Up until now I have been primarily a social media relations firm, aimed at helping businesses with this one specialty.
I enjoy social media because in my prior life I made a nice living in executive B2B sales, and social media was the guiding light to many of my greatest achievements. I was able to scale my lead generation/nurturing concepts to the corporate level, and integrate them into already-existing sales and marketing campaigns. It was a winning combination, however, it was not without its complications, which I ultimately determined to be major limitations.
Challenge 1: A business just kicking off a marketing campaign...
...is going to want more than social media in the mix, and because they are just getting started, they tend to be highly sensitive to costs, and will likely gravitate toward a marketing generalist before even considering using a specialist. While not a beneficial to my cause, I generally agreed. You really should have a central marketing voice first.
Challenge 2: When a marketing presence already exists,
I find quite a bit of resistance to the idea of my involvement. Right or wrong, many digital marketing mediums are viewed as add-on to business owners, and SM is often mis-categorized as a subordinate to marketing. This puts a lot of undue pressure on marketing to apply their traditional concepts to environments that are really more effective when directed by the sales initiatives.
This misappropriated set of expectations creates all sorts of problems in strategy and execution, as well as in the courting process.
Challenge 3: ROI from Closed-Loop Marketing
Over the course of 6 months I attended dozens of webinars, read hundreds of articles, engaged in countless conversations with other sales and marketing professionals and business owners, piloted several software trials, and conducted an exhausting amount of experiments. It was ridiculous, but I knew the answers were within reach, and I was getting closer by the day.
Then I find inbound marketing. Or should I say, inbound marketing found me?
It's hard to tell, really, because the discovery process was so enjoyable, that when the time came to pull the trigger, I was absolutely frothing at the mouth and could not sign on the dotted line fast enough.
So, here I am today, knee deep in possibly the most insanely awesome crash-course in technology and inbound marketing methodology out there, and I could not be more excited. Social media, you were awesome, and I'm happy to continue working with you, but you're going to have to share the limelight with email, website, landing pages, blogging, and a whole lot of killer marketing reporting tools. It's better this way, for both of us... for all of us, actually.
For more as it unfolds, subscribe to my blog, follow me on Twitter, and connect with me on LinkedIn.
Interested in an inbound marketing assessment? Click HERE!
Want to see how to apply inbound to your business, but not interested in talking to a person? Not to worry... we have you covered!
