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I have the enviable position of running HubSpot's value added reseller program. For almost a year now, I've been publishing educational content for marketing agencies who are eager to help their clients improve their inbound marketing ROI. Hundreds of agencies tune into these free webinars every month. It's humbling as I see more and more agencies each month listen to what we preach and implement it for themselves and their clients. Both our agency partners and their clients are seeing amazing results. It's such an honor to be able to help "transform the way the world markets" by impacting an army of agencies who will further spread the inbound marketing gospel.
But, it's usually more frustrating than anything.
Why? We produce volumes of content that agencies have the option of reading, viewing, sharing and implementing. With our free training program for marketing agencies, we will be producing even more soon. But, it's really hard to know what will resonate and what will fail. And usually, I get frustrated when something that I know is important --- seems to go un-implemented by our partners.
When I introduced a new way to help agencies help their clients calculate an ROI from inbound marketing, there was little immediate response. I thought, "Back to the drawing board on that one." I put it away for awhile and then re-introduced it on a webinar about 'Setting Lead Generation Goals'.
Still, no one really implemented it. So, I dropped it for another few months. Then, out of seemingly nowhere, I stumbled upon a prospective partners' website (Greg Elwell) where he adapted my inbound marketing calculator into something so much simpler and more use-able.
I realized that he linked to a draft article which never even got published on the blog. I mentioned it in the webinar, but because noone seemed to really care about it, I didn't even publish the blog post. I then tweeted Greg's article:
The tweet must have been read by another blogger who linked to both Greg's and my article.
At this point, I figured it might make sense to publish my second article with a better explanation of the process of 'calculating traffic goals from revenue goals'.
Then, I got an email from Dale Berkebile this morning. He put a deck together using my spreadsheet as the inspiration. He presented it to a group of HubSpot customers at the Fort Worth, Texas HubSpot meetup. The deck is so awesome and like Greg's calculator, so much more effective than the stuff I've published on the subject.
I'm embedding the deck here. My guess is that this will be the first of many many slideshare embeds of Dale's presentation. I'm also willing to bet that this will be taken by others and adapted and improved even more.
Marketing Lesson: Don't give up on your content. So much of the content you've created before is still relevant. Promote your evergreen content. Encourage others to adapt it. Often times, your idea isn't the right one or isn't communicated as best as it could be. In this case, my calculator was too complex and others simplified it.
You never know how your content will be used, adapted, simplified or improved. By putting ideas out there, early and often, you'll stand a better chance of helping someone somehow. Like I've been, you'll be humbled and amazed as others share your content, adapt it, and use it to inspire and help so many more people than you thought possible.