Inbound Marketing Summit Thoughts

I am going to interrupt my previous promise to write more about email marketing tools. But since I am currently at the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston, I would like to share with all of you about what Inbound Marketing really is.

First of all, most current popular marketing channels such as TV ads, radio, banner / pop-up ads, even many Email marketing and social media ads are considered interrupted marketing. This form of marketing is considered interrupted method because it pause the user from their routine and force them to respond to your messages. While I see this form of marketing to continue, the newer form of Inbound Marketing is gaining a great deal of growth and expansion because it attracts users and prospects who are already looking for information about your message to come find you. And this form if marketing is about listening to what users are saying, locating where these conversations are taking place, and engage them with your creative content.

While the earlier form of marketing unique utilize market research to locate the best channel to distribute your message and measure penetration of your message by eyeballs and impressions. With inbound marketing, research on channel is replaced by locating where the listeners are, what they are saying about your industry and products, and distribute multiple messages by engaging in conversations and coming up with interesting content. Measures of success is engagement. Is about how many readers and users you can engage in conversations.

This is where social media channels comes in. Even the PR industry is shifting their focus on chasing after media channels to attractive them via viral content on social media. So the strategy for many companies is not on hiring PR firms that distribute news, but rather to hire content generation experts in their industries and engage in conversations that will bring in traffic and sales.

I will try to be more specific in subsequent posts and maybe locate some firms that can really help companies succeed in this form of marketing.