I loved the concept of inbound marketing, in the context that I initially understood it, especially the storytelling and community building concepts.
And when I worked with the people who designed this blog I asked them to create a category called ‘Inbound Marketing’ because I felt that the concept had potential to effect change in the digital marketing world.
I didn't create the category to publish posts about inbound marketing, but to publish posts that people could relate to in the context of what inbound marketing represented.
One-to-one Marketing
Constantly sending emails about your whitepapers probably makes people think you are giving those away for free because you're really intending to use it as a way to sell product. Frequency can diminish value.
Putting people's first name in the email salutation isn't inbound marketing. Writing a personal email that offers something that's relevant to a need or pain point you discovered a specific person has would likely be more effective. Inbound marketing is sold as being more effective.
Inbound marketing seems like it should be more about one-to-one marketing. Inbound marketing would discover what kind of problems I'm working through right now. And what kind of challenges the people on my team are trying to overcome.
I want my team to be the best they can be, and that means I'm open minded to consider any resource that my team feels can best help them be efficient, agile, and moving towards achieving the long term goal. I have a team? Yes, you could easily find that out by looking at my LinkedIn profile. You could even easily use Twitter to find some of the people on my team.
If inbound marketing was inbound-marketed, inbound marketing would never be talked about by inbound marketers, right?
There should be a balance. There is no one perfect way for anybody. Every business is different based on factors like the maturity of the business and the near term objectives and the big goals on the long term view.
Can a community help almost any business, in any industry or niche? Of course. Community ups the chances of your survival rate, especially if you can build a thriving community within the first three years of launching your product or service.
And having a great product is probably far more important than being a great storyteller. Offer a great product and you will get other people to tell your story for you. It's just marketing.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
