In celebration of David Meerman Scott speaking live at the Inbound Marketing Summit on September 8 in Cambridge, MA, we're going to dedicate a whole week of content on the HubSpot Blog to David and his ideas.
Today, I am going to write about some of the key ideas from his last book New Rules of Marketing & PR (his newest book, Tuned In, just launched - more about that later this week)
The Old Rules: Buy your way in with interruption advertising or Beg your way in with PR.
Before the Internet, most marketing communications was based upon the principle that media was controlled by a small number of companies, and there were two ways to use media to reach consumers and businesses.
First, you could buy advertising to try to interrupt people from what they were doing to pay attention to your message. This was the age of the 30-second spot, the print ad, the billboard, etc. Hire expensive creative resources, buy expensive advertising placements, and hope people liked your message and bought your product.
Big companies and big brands had the money to do this pretty well, and they took advantage of that. All the ad campaigns you remember - "Have a Coke and a Smile", the Absolut Vodka print ads, Marlboro Man, etc. were born of the Old Rules age.
Second, you could beg your way into the media with PR. If you pitch hard enough and often enough, you might just get the media to say something about your company and your products. The public relations industry flourished by helping companies break into the tightly controlled media outlets since it was the only way to reach consumers.
The New Rules: Publish your way in with blogs, videos, viral content, and more.
After the Internet, the cost of producing, publishing and distributing media of all types became a lot cheaper. Not 30% cheaper, but maybe 99% cheaper. Consumers turn to search engines as a primary resource of information. What does this mean? It means you don't need the media anymore. It means you don't need to buy advertising. People ignore advertising anyways. They fast forward through it on their TiVo, their eyes skip over ads in newspapers. It also means that you can start your own newspaper (aka blog) online in a couple hours for free. You can start your own TV station for free on YouTube and other places. Why buy advertising when you can own the content? Why use PR to beg your way into media when you can publish your own and write whatever you want whenever you want?
We've been big believers in the New Rules of Marketing & PR, since even before the book came out. We have learned a lot from David and his perspective - he does a fabulous job bringing a lot of ideas together into a neat and understandable format, and he is a great and inspiring speaker and writer.
At HubSpot, we started blogging before we had a product to sell - we've written over 250 articles so far and have thousands of subscribers. We build free tools that spread virally like Website Grader (over 350,000 websites graded so far) and Press Release Grader (thousands of press releases graded in the first few weeks). We create videos and share them on YouTube. We have a HubSpot page on Facebook with over 550 fans. We host free monthly marketing webinars. We formed the Pro Marketers Group on LinkedIn, now with almost 5,000 members.
Basically, we follow David Meerman Scott's New Rules of Marketing using as many techniques of Inbound Marketing as we can. This is one of the reasons why we want to bring David's ideas to as many people as possible - they are inspiring, and they work. So, come join HubSpot and David Meerman Scott at the Inbound Marketing Summit. If you are a marketer, I promise you will learn a lot.
