The Ugly Truth about Inbound Marketing
Brian G. Burns
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For more then a decade inbound marketing has been seen as the answer. The argument goes like this. Advertisement or interrupt based marketing is no longer effective, people have become immune to advertisement. The more effective way is to create content and attract people. The idea is good and sure who is not sick of ads? So how is it working?
To determine how it is working you need to ask the customers of inbound marketing, no not the marketing team but the sales team. Sales is the customer of marketing. Marketing’s most tangible output is to provide leads for sales.
I work with salespeople from hundreds of companies and the consistent theme is that inbound marketing does attract leads. The problem is that the leads are trash. Not that they are unqualified but that they are literally trash. People visiting websites are smart enough today to know that if they give their contact information, they will be contacted, so they give a personal email address instead of their corporate address. In some cases less then 10% give a real phone number or name. Of course marketing counts these bogus contacts as leads and will spam them until they unsubscribe.
One sales person characterized inbound marketing as the Sadie Hawkins dance of business. For men it is easy to remember the Sadie Hawkins high school dance. We would be excited and relieved that we did not have to do the asking or paying. But of course the excitement dissipated when we discovered who was doing the asking... Then we had the hard choice of either going to the dance with someone we where not interested in or hurting their feelings. The analogy of inbound marketing as a Sadie Hawkins dance rings true. We are not necessarily attracting the desired lead. What we are attracting says one rep is the unemployed, competitors, consultants and the curious. In other words marketing is attracting not what they want but what they do not want. Why does marketing not care? Because marketing is evaluated base on number of leads versus the quality of leads. Yes, marketing is incentivized to do the wrong thing.
Of course there are companies that rave about their success with inbound marketing and yes most of them are selling inbound marketing products and services. Inbound marketing makes an assumption that the people who need what you sell are looking for what you sell. In most markets people are not looking and are bombarded with content so the person we do want to dance with is not visible.
I do agree that inbound marketing can produce quality leads but that has to be the focus instead of quantity.
Please share your experience with inbound marketing and what you see working.
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Brian
Experienced Branding and Digital Marketing Leader
7 年...and you are more likely to climb mount Everest than to click on a banner ad. What's the point? Customers will contact you if they know you exist and your brand aligns with their archetype well enough.
CMO at Jumpcloud
8 年There is some truth to this article, but a bit too much melodrama and generalization to be fully credible. Our business - for example - is not an inbound marketing tech service, but sees inbound leads convert more frequently, more quickly and at a lower cost. Why? Because our inbound marketing program is built to provide real value to prospects, differentiate our brand and build trust over time. That's not to say there isn't a place for outbound, but it's part of a carefully engineered mix.
Strategy, Innovation, and Marketing Leadership
8 年YES to this, "Inbound marketing makes an assumption that the people who need what you sell are looking for what you sell. In most markets people are not looking and are bombarded with content so the person we do want to dance with is not visible."
Writer + Abstract Artist at Roper Brown | Marketing Research, AI Coaching
8 年Great (concise, relevant, actionable) article! Too add to your thoughts, I suggest making lead-harvesting offers highly targeted to your Unique Selling Propositions and value. Result? Fewer leads. Less trash. More qualified.
Principal Consultant, Co-founder and Director at BabelQuest
8 年And the alternative is, what exactly? The key to successful inbound marketing is it's ongoing optimisation. Over time, the iterative improvements will reap rewards. Not earth-shattering, blow-your-months-number kind of results, but steady, predictable and scalable revenue growth. If your Sales and Marketing don't have a clearly defined service level agreement, you'll still get crappy results from marketing generated leads. It doesn't matter whether they were inbound, outbound, allbound, stolen or just made up (I'm looking at telemarketing agencies for that last one). If sales and marketing aren't aligned, marketing will fail. Here's the simple version of the SLA between Sales and Marketing. Every lead must be qualified as a fit first. Don't pass duff information. Then Sales must make the connection attempts. If they make the agreed number of attempts, with no success, pass the lead back for nurture. If they talk and agree to move forward - big thumbs up to Marketing. If it's a fit, but no urgency - pass back to marketing for nurturing. If it's no fit - disqualify the lead and tell Marketing why. Marketing use that feedback to improve their qualification criteria/content/conversion paths. If Sales are saying inbound marketing leads are trash, then ask why. Put the SLA in place and drive the improvements. Sooner or later you'll run into the REAL problem with marketing and sales. Then the fun really begins. It's time to think about this whole thing as a buyer. Bang the rocks together guys.