Will Inbound marketing grow your business?
Like with all buzzwords that drive us ecommerce jockeys into frenzies, the coining of ‘Inbound Marketing’ by HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan is the nominalisation of an effective system for driving business growth; in this instance a system that bridges the gaps between marketing, design, customer care and sales. It looks at a human’s interaction with your company as a journey, beginning as a stranger and being pulled towards the sale through snippets of information that entertain, educate, and ultimately lead to the conversion from stranger to loyal customer.
This style of marketing is nothing new, in fact, there are examples of it being used as long ago as the late 1880s when the initial Sears catalogue (a history of which you can find here) printed testimonials, talked about the customer (not just the products) and wrote personal experiences of products. This style of language is the keystone of the ‘marketing’ element of Inbound. What Sears did was use his market research to describe product experiences through personal stories and his own customers in ways that he knew would resonate with consumers. No more plain product descriptions but engaging and rich messages to incite the imagination and draw customers to products instead of pushing products on customers.
"An effective Inbound strategy must have a complete understanding of the customer; from demography to psychography"
This ‘push versus pull’ interpretation of Inbound marketing is the most common descriptor for the system created by HubSpot, but an effective inbound strategy neither starts nor ends with the switch to this kind of marketing language; assuming so is one of the reasons so many companies don’t see the return they expected.
An effective Inbound strategy must have a complete understanding of the customer; from demography to psychography. The perfect Inbound marketing results in the product selling itself by proxy of having drawn the perfect customer to the product, and not the other way around. What is the perfect customer? Of the billions of people who inhabit our world, there is only a very small percentage of people you need to buy your product or service for your company to be an absolute hit. Assuming (which we never do!) that there are people out there who will want exactly what you offer, why waste advertising money to show ads to so many other people who will never buy your products? Why not learn who the customers you want are and invest only in attracting them?
"The counterexample to spray’n’pray marketing is the increasing dependence on testimonials, photos, and reviews"
It’s not such a curious idea; just reference your own buying habits. How often do you drive to work in the morning and see a billboard advertising a product that you ‘must have’? How many infomercials make you take out your phone on the spot to purchase products? This shotgun approach to marketing isn’t efficient, especially not online where the markets are far bigger, causing the message to further be genericised leading to even less resonance with a potential customer.
The counterexample to spray’n’pray marketing is the increasing dependence on testimonials, photos, and reviews; how often have you bought the product on Amazon with the best reviews and 5-star ratings over the even flashier one with none? In a world where we can’t hold the product, test it out, inspect it, weigh it, we rely on the testimonial of others to tell us how good it is. Why would you listen to what the manufacturer has to say? Of course, they’re going to say it’s excellent, that’s their job.
"if you write about those pains, and how they can be resolved, do more customers interact with the products you provide?"
If you’re interested in developing your own Inbound marketing strategy there is no time like the present. It’s a common myth that content creation requires huge data on customers, or fully fleshed-out buyer personas. A successful Inbound strategy will have an immense understanding of the customer, true, but how do small business and start-ups start if they don’t have this info? The answer is a simple concept by Eric Ries called validated learning. In Ries’ book The Lean Startup, he discusses validated learning as the outcome of an experiment to test customer behaviour. A simple example of validated learning could be to release a new product feature in a localised market. If this new feature yields greater sales then you have learnt this new feature is valuable to your customers, you could roll it out across your other markets (this is a simplified explanation, and I thoroughly recommend anyone looking to build or pivot a company to read it).
If we apply this concept to building an Inbound marketing strategy we can start to create content immediately and build as we learn. Take, for example, a blog. You know your product and you have a rough idea of what your customers’ pains are and how your product can help resolve them. The test becomes ‘if you write about those pains, and how they can be resolved, do more customers interact with the products you provide?’. An example a mentor of mine once gave was of an online car parts retailer. His first posts were product descriptions that talked about the science that went into the production of the parts, why they worked the way they did, and how they’d been built. Interesting stuff if you’re an engineer, but his customers weren’t engineers. They were simply looking to buy car parts directly instead of from a mechanic who would charge at a severe markup. His blog changed over time as he started to write about the way people could save money by buying and fitting car parts themselves. He talked about how to change car batteries and how to fit new bulbs. His how-to guides were filled with valuable information for an audience willing to buy the products he sold. Were his customers loyal? Hell yeah, he was teaching them for free how to save hundreds of euro every year. Did the content lead to sales? Of course, if someone is interested in fixing a problem with their car, google for the solve, and read his article they are told exactly what parts they need, how to fit them, and are then offered those exact parts at a competitive rate.
"No data is data itself"
The point is that no data is data itself. Sometimes we need to just try things out to see if they work. The important thing is to have your eyes open for the results. If you’re writing a blog do you have calls to action that you can measure? Do you have Google Analytics implemented on your site measuring how many people are coming and reading your articles? Are their clear metrics, and a system of measuring them on your site that can validate the efforts you’re making?
Inbound marketing isn’t all blogs either; is there any reason you can’t ask for reviews or testimonials immediately? If you have customers, then you have an opportunity. Ask them what they think, incentivise them to review your products on multiple sources (Google My business, Social Media Channels, wherever you are doing your marketing). Are your customers a marketing channel in themselves? If a customer is truly happy with your service, there’s a good chance they’ll help spread the word so what are you doing to make sure they’re getting exactly what they want from your business? This can be done through Google forms, monitoring reviews, and, especially when starting your business, keeping in close contact with your initial customers. If they think you are the bee’s knees, they are going to be integral in getting your next customers so make sure you take care of them!
"I can think of no instance of validated learning, and customer research that would not help grow your business"
There is nothing to stop any of us from building a strategy around the concepts of Inbound marketing and Lean; in fact, there’s every reason to start. I can think of no instance of validated learning, and customer research that would not help grow your business, especially as a start-up. It would be negligent not to say that this is also a personal agenda as the old methods of marketing seriously grind my gears. As a single person, several years away from even thinking about children, I see baby-formula ads everywhere; they stalk my online experiences, I see them on the telly, they stare at me in my car on the way to work, judging me for not engaging, the mock me in my recommended products on Amazon. It’s like the more I don’t engage the greater their efforts become to entice me into buying a product that is entirely irrelevant to me! As the adage goes, “marketing is the devil’s work”; but it doesn’t have to be.