Since many of us at HubSpot are quantitative marketers, our natural bias is to show the numbers to "inbound marketing non-believers" in order to prove that inbound marketing works.
We're constantly sharing the Inbound Marketing ROI report and all of our case studies. We also transparently share the inbound lead generation results from our own marketing efforts. (See the graphs in Prashant's post about leveraging the long tail for online marketing.)
No matter how much evidence and logic we present, though, there are so many small business owners that find a reason not to start inbound marketing. As explained so eloquently in Frank Reed's guest post, there are lots of roadblocks and "excuses" standing in the way of most small business's inbound marketing success.
In the 1.5+ years I've been at Hubspot, I've seen 100s of companies embrace and excel at inbound marketing. But, that doesn't make it much easier to get the next 1,000 to embrace it.
From my experience, most people only believe something will work for them once they've done it themselves and it worked for them.
Thus, the quandary... a Catch-22.
So, when the Worcester Chamber invited me to do an all day workshop on internet marketing, I jumped at the opportunity. I spoke at the Chamber's New England Business Expo a year ago to a packed room.
The attendees walked away from the seminar "believing". However, only a few of them started "doing". A bunch more said they needed more training. So, the Chamber called and asked if we could do a longer more hands-on format.
The event is designed to have small business owners and marketers actually start doing their inbound marketing.
The most common question that I expect to hear during the event is, "How long will this take for me to achieve online lead generation success?"
We'll show them how to determine the time and effort it takes to achieve their goals - using keyword, website and competitive data.
But, my other answer will be to show the inbound marketing stats from the event website. It took us about 5 weeks to sign up 30 people for the event. Based on the current sign up rate, we should have 50 attendees. We used no traditional marketing methods to market this. No direct mail. No cold calling. Just blogging, social media and email invitations to a very small portion of our opt-in email list. We didn't even implement all of the suggestions in Ellie's excellent "inbound marketing for events" guide.
Free Online Crash Course on Inbound Marketing...
 | Do you want to start DOING your inbound marketing? Learn how to attract more traffic, generate more leads and convert more leads into customers at this all day internet marketing workshop. May 13th, Worcester, MA. Learn more by taking the free online crash course. |