Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

Brian Halligan presenting at Inbound Marketing Summit 2011

One of the first presentations came from Brian Halligan, co-founder and CEO of Hubspot. As one of the people who literally wrote the book on inbound marketing, it makes sense that he would give us his vision of the future of inbound marketing. He didn’t disappoint!

Shifting the Funnel

Brian began with a review of inbound marketing and its effects on marketing. In the beginning, he said, sales reps had all the power. They controlled the information flow with catalogs and collateral. If the buyer wanted information, they had make the sales rep part an integral part of the buying cycle.

Not anymore. The sales process (more often than not) now begins with an Internet search. The buyer has all of the information and, therefore, the power. This has shifted the sales funnel and requires a new approach, since the buyer now keeps the seller at arms reach.

Top of the Funnel

Inbound marketing 1.0 was about expanding the top of the sales funnel. By creating remarkable content, optimizing it for search, promoting it via social media and building effective landing pages, businesses can expand the top of the funnel. It’s not just about generating more visits – it’s about generating more qualified visits. Good inbound marketing achieves exactly that.

Middle of the Funnel

Where inbound marketing 1.0 is about expanding the top of the funnel, version 2.0 is about improving the conversion rates throughout the funnel. Halligan spoke about the gaps in the funnel and losses from them:

The aim of inbound marketing 2.0 is to reduce those losses as much as possible and to improve the conversion rates throughout. So how do we do that? Like so many other answers to business questions, it’s “Do what successful companies are doing.” Halligan points to companies like Amazon, Google and Netflix as examples. What’s one secret to their success? Personalization. The more you use their services, the better the user experience becomes and the more value users gain from it.

LinkedIn profile percent complete - irresistible

The inbound marketing takeaway is to keep track of every activity your lead takes on your site and personalize that marketing experience. The more I use your website, the more personalized it gets. The more personalized it gets, the more valuable it is. The more valuable it is, the more likely I am to convert to a customer. One example he offers is the “percent complete” profile builder on LinkedIn. “It’s irresistible!” Halligan insists.

And he suggests you incorporate similar marketing profiles into your websites. The entire goal is to segment the crap out of your leads toward the ultimate goal, which I think is absolutely brilliant:

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Cartoon courtesy of xkcd.com

OK, this cartoon is an admittedly cynical analogy to make to lead generation, but what the heck. I’m not suggesting that posters to LinkedIn and Quora are lonely or angsty, but I am saying that generating leads from them is frequently like shooting fish in a barrel. If you haven’t considered it before or don’t know how or just need need a kick in the pants to get going on it, then read on!

LinkedIn and Quora are two of the best kept secret weapons in lead generation. I’m frustrated on an almost daily basis when I see questions on those sites that are direct inquiries about a product or service that’s offered by someone I know (a client or colleague). These are softball pitches that should be knocked out of the park, but instead they fall with a soft thud and roll to the backstop. These are perfect opportunities to do the following:

• Practice the “social” part of social media – engaging in conversations
• Spreading your content and creating back-links
• Beginning a new relationship with a gift
• Bringing leads into your sales pipeline

Let’s get to it…

Step #1: Start Trolling

This step is fairly easy on LinkedIn. Their “Answers” feature is broken down into categories and sub-categories. Each of these is available via RSS subscription. For example, the Sales and Marketing topic contains eight sub-topics and two of them, in turn, have sub-topics.

LinkedIn Answers: Marketing & Sales (click on image for full size)

LinkedIn RSS feeds (click for full size)

Quora is still a bit new and hasn’t developed ways to easily monitor the questions without visiting the site itself. Part of the reason for this is that the topics are not predetermined by Quora; any user can create a topic themselves. As a result, you can select a much more granular set of questions. Additionally, you can follow other Quora users and individual questions. The main difference between Quora and LinkedIn is that Quora allows users to vote up and down other users’ answers and also supports threaded conversations.

Quora Topics (click for full size)

Step #2: Answer Questions

Once you come across a question that deals with your product or service, you have an opportunity. But don’t kill your sale! If you try to launch into a direct sales pitch, you’re going to turn everyone off and perhaps be flagged as a spammer. Instead, do the following:

• First and foremost, answer the question! It’s very frustrating to read through a list of answers that dart off into tangents, especially if those tangents are naked sales pitches.
• Second, include a link.
  • If you have an existing blog post or web site page that provides additional information, that’s great! After answering the question, say something like, “The following link contains some additional information that you may also find useful.”
  • If you don’t have an existing blog post or page, consider creating one. This is also a great way to generate ideas for blog posts if you’re stuck.
  • If you don’t have the time to create content to specifically address the question, then include a link to an appropriate “About” page for either the product or service. This is a last resort and should only be done if your product and/or service is directly related to the question.
• Third, invite the person to follow up with you personally. Most times, I’ll send this invite privately. You’d be surprised how many will do just that.

I’ve found LinkedIn to be very valuable for lead generation and secured a couple of clients from answering questions. Quora is a new experience and I haven’t landed any new customers yet, but I did have one of my answers featured on the Duct Tape Marketing blog.

What’s working for you? Any additional tips or tricks?

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme is “The Tangled Web.” An effective web presence used to mean a well-optimized (for search) web site. But today, the ever-expanding world of social networks is both complicating and simplifying the process at the same time. This week’s links reflect on how social media sites are impacting search and connecting with one another.

#5: Your Income, Home Ownership & Parenthood Status Now Available as an API

RapLeaf has taken some heat over the past couple of months. Privacy concerns for consumers are going to have to be balanced with the openness of the Internet. The U.S. Congress is even making noise about a “Do Not Track” registry for Internet browsers that is similar to the “Do Not Call” registry for telemarketers.

Link: ReadWriteWeb

#4: Facebook Testing New Registration Social Plugin

Facebook is looking to extend its fingers further across the web by providing web developers with more tools to simplify their tasks. By offering a free registration system for web sites, they are strengthening their position as a standard identity provider on the web.

Link: All Facebook

#3: LinkedIn Launches Share Button

I have no idea what took LinkedIn so long, but they have finally created a share button for web site owners to allow users to easily share their content with LinkedIn. Sharing is fundamentally changing the world of search marketing and is eating away at the monopoly search engines have had since the inception of the Internet.

Link: Mashable

#2: Twitter Proven to Impact Search Engine Rankings

In my Personal Inbound Marketing talks, I frequently encourage people to use Twitter as much for the inbound links as for the engagement. In other words, even if you don’t have a lot of followers there is value in posting your content there in the form of search engine juice. This article provides more supporting evidence for that strategy.

Link: Hubspot

#1: Why WordPress rules the Web

Blogs are the engines that drive Inbound Marketing. There simply isn’t a better system for delivering your remarkable content in a search engine optimized format. Here’s another person’s opinion on the subject.

Link: SEO Theory

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week discusses how technology is shaping our online behavior and options.

#5: Report: Meaningless Facebook Comments Are Cornerstone Of Useful Networks

According to a new report from the National IT User Center at Uppsala University, those useless (and frequently annoying) updates and Tweets actually serve to make us feel closer to those people than we otherwise would.  ”“The portrait, comments, and updates provide constant reminders of the existence of ‘friends.’ The content is not all that important, but the effect is that we perceive our Facebook friends as closer than other acquaintances who are not on Facebook,” explains Doctoral Candidate Håkan Selg, who compiled the report.

Link: All Facebook

#4: Now even more ways to customize your LinkedIn profile

The professional networking site LinkedIn announced this week that it has introduced some new tweaks for your profile.  Given that, according to Jobvite’s 2010 Social Recruiting survey, 65% of companies will use LinkedIn for recruiting it’s important to squeeze every drop of effectiveness out of your profile as possible.

Link: The LinkedIn Blog

#3: The Time Is Ripe For A Chief Marketing Technologist

This concept came from Mitch Joel who borrowed it from Scott Brinker.  Joel (and I) found that Brinker’s message resonated: “Marketing has become deeply entwined with technology. This didn’t happen overnight; it’s been sneaking up on us for a while. But because technology had been so tangential to marketing management for most of our history, the organizational structure of marketing has been slow to adjust to this new technology-centric reality. But we’ve clearly reached a tipping point. To fully reap the benefits of this Golden Age, marketing must officially take ownership of its technology platforms and strategies. And the first step of such ownership is to appoint someone to lead it. Enter the chief marketing technologist.”

Link: Six Pixels of Separation

#2: Steve Job’s Epic 5-Minute Anti-Google Rant

This snippet from Apple’s earning conference call earlier this week is setting the table for the next entry.  It may seem that I quote Steve Jobs a lot in this blog, and I do because I think Apple, Google, and Facebook are the juggernauts that are defining how the Internet is going to continue to evolve.  In this case, Jobs is articulating a fundamental difference in business strategies between Apple and Google regarding how applications are supported on their respective devices.  According to Jobs, Apple is providing an “integrated” solution (as opposed to “closed”), while Google’s Android OS is providing a fractured (as opposed to “open”) solution.  He asserts that users prefer integrated over fractured.

#1: Is an App a Tool or a Behavior?

John Jantsch wrote the forward for a new book titled, “App Savvy.” Jantsch says, “The first step to becoming app savvy is to recognize why the app category is red-hot and here to stay, and why you need to think in terms of tapping app behavior to package, repackage, purpose, and repurpose everything that a mobile social consumer wants to do—and even a few things they don’t know they want to do.”  The combination of Jobs’ earnings call rant and this post led me to link them together in my article, “Why Developers Could Be Your Best Friend.”

Link: Duct Tape Marketing

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As a certified inbound marketing professional, I show businesses how to get the most from their Internet presence.  By using these same low/no cost techniques, individuals can harness the power of the Internet for their own personal career development goals.   “Personal Inbound Marketing” reveals the five principals of inbound marketing and show how even non-technical people can expand their professional network and establish powerful online brands for about $6 per month.

This presentation was given to a networking group named Faithworks in Westford, MA.

Alternately, you can view the slidecast below or download the presentation:

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