Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs

Suggested Interview Questions for BRIAN HALLIGAN and DHARMESH SHAH , Authors of INBOUND MARKETING 

What exactly do you mean by the term “inbound”?  Would you explain the key differences between “inbound” and “outbound” marketing? 

For the last 50 years, big companies were built around efficiently spending money to interrupt their way into their potential customers’ wallets through telemarketing, email marketing, advertising, etc.  Most people today are sick and tired of being marketed to and are getting better and better at blocking those interruptions out with things like TIVO, CallerID, and spam protection.  While all this has been going on, there has been a transformation in the way people shop and learn – people live in Google, social media sites, and blogs.  Inbound marketing is about “getting found” by potential customers in the natural course of the way they shop and learn. 

As you observe in INBOUND MARKETING, most companies put all of their web energy into their website.  What’s wrong with that? 

Most people thing of the website as the pages on their site and worry too much about how it looks and feels.  The important part about a website is all the stuff happening off your site – links to it from other sites, ranking in Google, industry discussions in Twitter, etc.  The concept of a website needs to be transformed to include all the other important things that are happening on the internet about your brand and your industry.

What does it take to transform the standard company website into what you describe as a “marketing hub’?   

Most websites are like “billboards in the desert” (i.e. no one is driving by!).  Most websites are visited by people who already know about the company.  Websites should be like magnets that pull people in from Google, social media sites, and blogs.  In order to transform your site into a “hub” on the internet, you should (1) create lots of content through a blog; (2) optimize that content for Google and social media sites; (3) promote that content in the social media sites; (4) convert that traffic to leads with great calls to action; and (5) nurture those leads into customers.

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