What in the world is Inbound Marketing?

This morning I attended a social media ‘breakfast’ hosted by a local PR agency, PMG here in Burlington, VT. I put breakfast in quotes because although there was indeed breakfast available – and plenty of it, this event was more like a seminar/tweet-up held in an auditorium. There was a nice crowd – maybe 150 people (pretty good turn out for little ol’ Burlington) who all wanted to learn more about how Inbound Marketing can help their businesses.

Acccording to Wikipedia, Inbound Marketing can be defined one of two ways:

1. Inbound marketing is a style of marketing that focuses on getting found by customers. This sense is related to relationship marketing and Seth Godin‘s idea of permission marketing. David Meerman Scott recommends that marketers “publish their way in” (via blogs etc.) in contrast to outbound marketing where they used to have to “buy their way in” (via paid advertisements). Next best action marketing can also be applied.
2. Inbound marketing is market research. In this sense, pieces of information about customer needs, not customers themselves, flow into the company. Knowledge of customer needs drives future product capability. This sense is related to the term product management. Peter Drucker believed this to be the quintessence of marketing.

Rick Burnes of Hubspot was the guest of honor and conducted a fairly thorough overview about how Inbound Marketing helps businesses get found online and convert those site visitors into qualified leads or customers.

A few of the standout pieces of information I gained from Rick’s presentation include:

• New channels of marketing such as blogging and social media are making much of the old-school marketing staples like tradeshows, print, tv and radio advertising irrelevant. Also – these new channels are FREE – its how you use them that takes time and know-how.
• Maintaining a blog is not an option – blogging helps you get the most/best traffic to your website and feeds to/from all of your social media efforts.
• Think of your involvement with social media and inbound marketing as a set of lottery tickets: the more tickets you hold (like Twitter, Facebook, a blog, bookmarking, email marketing, landing pages on your web site, etc) the higher chance of ‘winning’.
• The topics of tweets and blog posts should be less about you, and more about your customers, followers and community. Unique contributions like links to great content and information, videos, and images get redistributed the most.

Check out the Rick Burnes’ presentation from 12/15/09′s BTVSMB
You can catch up with all the tweets and info sharing that took place during and after the seminar by searching for the hashtag “#btvsmb” on Twitter.

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