Inbound Marketing for Startups How to earn your customers interest, rather than buying it with great content, SEO, social & conversion marketing. Rand Fishkin | CEO http://bit.ly/imforstartups

Lets Start with a Story

R My First 6 Years as a Startup Founder Blog post: http://randfishkin.com/blog/103/just-keep-going Rand and Gillians Combined Personal Debt

The Last 5 Years More about Mozs History: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-story-of-seomoz Monthly Visits We took one round of financing in 2007; $1.1MM from Ignition + Curious Office

The Last 5 Years More about Mozs History: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-story-of-seomoz Monthly Visits Launched our Link Graph Index

The Last 5 Years More about Mozs History: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-story-of-seomoz Monthly Visits In 2009, we dropped consulting entirely

The Last 5 Years More about Mozs History: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-story-of-seomoz Monthly Visits 2010 had 7,000 paying subscribers

The Last 5 Years Full story at http://randfishkin.com/blog/128/misadventures-venture-capital-funding Monthly Visits Failed to raise funding (despite long, nasty efforts) in 2009 and 2011

The Last 5 Years More about Mozs History: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-story-of-seomoz Monthly Visits 2011 will be our first 8-figure year, with 15,000 subscribers and nearly 1.5mm visits/month

How Do We Get Customers? ~18% of our signups come via paid channels (in blue); the rest are via inbound channels Paid Channels Inbound

Interruption vs. Inbound

Interruption Marketing

Inbound Marketing

Interruption Marketing

Inbound Marketing

Interruption Marketing

Inbound Marketing

Some Marketing

Interruption Stop Us

From Doing What We Want

R So It Can Sell Us

R Stuff We Dont Need

Thats Interruption Marketing.

R

R Interruption Marketers

R Interruption Marketers Me

R Interruption Marketers Me Ads

R Thats Not How We Roll.

How People Buy in 2011

R Realize a Need

R Investigate Options

R Ask Our Friends

R Seek Out Experts

R Find Communities

R Dig Into Every Detail Available

R Convert

R You Dont Buy Those Visitors. You Earn Them.

R

• • Inbound Marketing

• • -noun

• • Any tactic that relies on earning peoples interest rather than buying it.

R Were Here to Help

Startups Disrupt Markets. How About Marketing?

Inbound Channels

Content

Influences Everything

Without Great Content

Theres No Chance of Success.

Content Can Mean:

Content.

Community

Product

Or Distribution

No Matter the Form; Content is the Foundation of Great Inbound Marketing

Search

Search is How Things Get Found.

Search = Discovery

Discovery Leads to Sharing

Search is Still Big

And Growing Currently, there are more than 3 billion searches/day on Google

Search Often Brings the Most Highly Qualified Traffic

But Guess Where Searchers Click ~20% of clicks ~80% of clicks

Social

Social Lives at the Top of the Funnel

Social is Discovery Prior to Interest

Social Demands Great Content,

And Rewards It.

Today, Social is a Huge Influence on Search

And Social Appears to Be Fragmenting into Multiple Large Communities (and thousands of small ones) 120mm Users: 50mm 750mm 200mm 10mm Users: 14mm Millions 14mm 6.5mm

Email

Email is Socials Secret Weapon http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/05/social-medias-secret-weapon-email.html

And Email Marketing is Insanely Profitable/Powerful http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/seomoz-case-study/

Conversion

The Funnel Only Exists So It Can Convert.

Optimizing Conversion Means Measuring & Testing http://dmix.ca/2010/05/how-we-increased-our-conversion-rate-by-72/

It Means Listening, Too.

A Lot of Conversion is Wrapped in Soft Metrics

Branding

Messaging

Familiarity

Trust

CRO is a Critical Practice

But it Requires Holistic Marketing to Succeed.

Building an Inbound Strategy

R Who is Your Audience? http://xrrr-slog.blogspot.com/2007/10/corporate-demographics-2007.html

R Where are they on the Web? http://searchengineland.com/a-portrait-of-who-uses-social-networks-in-the-u-s-and-how-social-media-affects-our-lives-81653

R What Content Works There? http://blog.echen.me/2011/03/14/hacker-news-analysis/

R

R How Will You Get Visitors Into Your Funnel