I recently spoke at Demandcon in San Francisco (I'll tweet the slides later today via
@jlopin
, so
follow me
there if you want to take a look). I wanted to give three awesome pieces of advice that would
really
help people succeed with inbound marketing. The trouble was, what should the 3 things be?
Leading up to the event, I struggled to articulate the essence of inbound marketing in three concise, actionable statements. I couldn't sleep, and I was stressed.
And then I finally remembered that I work with 200 of the most brilliant marketers in the world, and I could just ask them to tell me the answer.
So I fired off an email with the following simple question (and then I went to sleep): "If you could only give three pieces of advice to marketers before you die, what would you say?"
The responses I got from my colleagues were awesome: passionate, pragmatic, and characteristically MITish:
1.
Stop thinking like an advertiser. Stop renting your audience. Build your own. Start thinking like a publisher.
2.
Marketing is not about arts & crafts. You need to understand (based on data) what's working and what's not. Then, you need to stop doing the stuff that isn't working (or fix it), and do more of the stuff that
is
working.
3. You need to get good at
converting
your traffic into leads & customers.
The best part of this process was the emails I got back from my colleagues. I've included the highlights below. Click the little light bulb guy and the quote shows up below the table.
Note: You can click the names in the table to read their blog articles or subscribe to them by RSS (which is, by the way, an awesome
feature of the HubSpot blogging engine
).
In addition to the advice above, I feel compelled to end this post with two great quotes that just didn't fit into the table:
"Even if you think you're doing inbound marketing, you're likely not being aggressive enough. You have 10% of your portfolio in a stock that is the best investment ever, and it should be 70%."
-- Mike Volpe
"Stop worrying about it and do it, stop worrying about it and do it, stop worrying about it and do it."
-- Mike Redbord
Now, let me put the question to you: If
you
could only give a marketer 3 pieces of advice, what would you say?