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Want to become The Awesomest Marketer EVER? Here's a simple 5-step formula to guarantee your success.
STEP 1: Stop Interrupting People!
Nobody likes being interrupted. That includes your customers, leads, prospects, neighbors, children, etc. We used to tolerate intrusive advertising. These days, we don't have to.
Which is probably why 91% of people have unsubscribed to an email they previously opted-in to, and why 86% of people skip TV ads, and at least 44% of direct mail goes straight into the recycling bin.
Instead of interrupting the things in which people are interested, awesome marketers work on becoming the things in which people are interested.
STEP 2. Be Where Your Audience Is.
Once upon a time, your audience could easily be found listening to the radio, watching TV, searching for your business in the yellow pages, attending a trade show, or sifting thoughtfully through a small stack of mail.
NO LONGER.
Today's reality is both more fascinating and more challenging for many marketers, and it is this: your audience is online.
- 78% of people use search engines to conduct product research.
- 57% of US Adult Internet users conducted a search today.
- 93% of US Adult Internet users are on Facebook.
- One out of every eight minutes online is spent on Facebook.
Get the idea?
Put another way, Google is your new business card, and Facebook is your new referral engine. If you are not AWESOME at using search engines and social networks to market your company/product/service, you are most definitely missing the proverbial boat.
STEP 3. Go inbound!
It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and outbound marketers are wearing steak-flavored underpants.
Outbound marketing—or the practice of paying for "impressions"—might appear to be the easiest, fastest way to reach your audience, but what happens when you stop paying?
Nothing, that's what.
Because outbound marketing does not create any reusable assets. It's the single-serving, disposal snack-pack of marketing.
Inbound marketing, by contrast, requires much less cash (if any) upfront, but more effort and time. Your results may not be instant, but they'll be lasting.
Example:
In 2007, HubSpot had 10 beta customers, 5 employees, and generated roughly 60-90 leads per month. Today, we have 4,500 customers, 200 employees, and generate 40,000 leads per month. Much of that growth (and a large portion of those 40,000 leads) was produced by inbound marketing assets (like blog posts, ebooks, videos, presentations, podcasts, etc.) that were created four years ago by those first five employees.
Collectively, HubSpot's library of inbound marketing assets have amassed over 7,000,000 views. Our monthly web traffic is more than double that of better-known, more established companies that are many times our size. Between blog subscribers, email lists, and social media fans/followers, our reach is more like that of a media company than a marketing software company.
All of this is true because we eat our own dogfood, and that awesome food happens to be called Inbound Marketing.
STEP 4. Build an awesome marketing team!
Awesome marketers build awesome marketing teams. They recognize that in today's rapidly changing world, marketing experience matters less than digital chops, an analytical mindset, existing "reach," and the ability to create remarkable content. At HubSpot, we refer to this short list of attributes as "DARC" (Digital, Analytical, Reach, Content), and we actively recruit, hire, and develop awesome marketers that possess these very qualities.
Read more about building an awesome marketing team here.
STEP 5: Simplify!
Remember the good old "K.I.S.S." acronym? That's right—"Keep It Simple, Silly." The Awesomest Marketer Ever seeks to streamline and simplify her marketing tools and processes. Instead of using one product for analytics, another for social media, a third for SEO, a fourth for her website, a fifth for email, and three or four others for sales and CRM functions, she's smart enough to seek out the ONE that pulls them all together.
Come to think of it, it's quite likely that the Awesomest Marketer Ever is a HubSpot customer... or at the very least, is considering becoming one soon ;).
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