What kind of accent do you have?
This isn’t a question about your native language or English skills. It references my favorite quote from Brian Halligan, CEO of Hubspot who was one of the presenters at the Inbound Marketing Conference in Boston September 14, 2011.
“You should hire marketing people who know how to speak Internet without an accent.”
- Brian Halligan, CEO & Founder, Hubspot
What did he mean by that? It’s about making sure your marketing organization isn’t using only old-school “outbound” marketing techniques: Interruption, shouting, push…marketing. In other words, cold calling, sending out junk mail, spam or unsolicited email.
You want marketers who understand how to use Inbound marketing techniques (social media, web sites, communication channels, closing the sales loop with relevant content and email outreach). Your web site, your sales reps and your marketing channels should all be working together to start a conversation with customers that leads to knowledge exchange and relationship building.
Engaging the customer
To be effective in the digital era, you want to engage your customer through personalization (or as we like to call it P2P) in all areas: social media, real world, and web site. Personalized web sites (think Amazon, Netflix, Google) know what content their visitors (excuse me…make that USERS) want to see and learn more about, and serve up a site that gives them exactly what they want.
Tracking the pages that individual users visit on your site, the emails that get them to click through to your site, or the Tweets they retweet…all of these things help you create more customized marketing content that gives the customer what they really are looking for. It’s called Inbound Marketing. And it is where marketing is going in the future.
Not familiar with Inbound Marketing? Read more here.
Missed the Summit?
Watch Brian Halligan’s video here, from the Pulse Network:
Find out more about inbound marketing
