INBOUND MARKETING What in the heck is

? P E R M I S S I O N

What the heck is Inbound Marketing? …or as I prefer to call it, Permission Marketing. I’ll start with a story… Twenty years ago, I worked for RR Donnelley, the world's largest printing company. My boss had me write a white paper that I titled...

Dead PRINT IS

The thesis was that the Internet would replace print and we had better figure this out. Print may not be dead but the Internet has had a huge impact on printing. Donnelley is still struggling to get it and their profits show that. All of this just illustrates what we've all witnessed...

PEOPLE LOVED ADS They were part of our culture

In our lifetimes we've seen the biggest societal change since Gutenberg’s press. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the ad business. It used to be that you could put an ad in a magazine or on TV and people would buy your product. That doesn’t work anymore.

Was it Woodstock?

You can point at lots of causes for the change. The Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, the economic crisis in the late 70’s, but I think the change was driven by technology...

LUNCH AND LEARN Note the handsome wood grain

… and specifically, it was driven by the VCR. For the first time, We The People were in charge of how people would market to us. If I don't like your commercial, I'm just going to fast forward through it and with that, Permission Marketing was born.

Then the Internet came along and really gave consumers a choice. I remember my first online permission marketing experience. In ‘92, my wife and I were headed to Williamsburg, Virginia. I found three bed and breakfasts on America Online. I had them all bid for our business. It's more sophisticated now but the fundamentals haven’t changed.

ATTRACTION ENGAGEMENT RELATIONSHIP CONVERSION

Permission marketing is about…

The idea is to empower the market with tools to help them choose and then of course be so great that they choose you. The marketing funnel that we always talk about is a 4-step process. First you need to attract traffic. Once you have an audience, you need to engage them, building relationships as you go, then convert these relationships into customers.

ATTRACTION ENGAGEMENT RELATIONSHIP CONVERSION

Permission marketing is about…

To me, the most critical part of the process is mid-funnel, and that’s engagement. I figure that if we're engaged, then turning that into a relationship is pretty easy. Once you get people to this point Then even if they don’t buy today I’ve created an ambassador who will help me in the future.

THE RENDEZVOUS

In the Old West, once a year thousands of trappers, frontiersmen, Indians, traders and industrialists from the East would meet for a Rendezvous south of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. For them, this was the highlight of the year and the culmination of the season. Most of these people led rather solitary lives so the Rendezvous was the social event of the year. At the Rendezvous, stories of adventure were shared and Fortunes were made.

Where’s our Rendezvous?

At the core of any permission marketing strategy is the place where the engagement happens – the Rendezvous. This can be anywhere that makes sense for the business: real world or online – a website, Facebook page, YouTube channel, a blog or thousands of other places.

Engagement

I'm an amateur landscape photographer. My Rendezvous is Flickr. It's the place that I direct everyone interested in my pictures to engage me.

RENDEZVOUS? Where’s your

For some companies, their Rendezvous is the telephone. Nothing happens without a live conversation. For others, their Rendezvous is their website’s Contact Us form. Think of the Rendezvous as the place where we come together for a conversation. Before there’s a Point of Choice – there’s a Rendezvous.

No ask … no dance.

The goal is engagement but it starts with attraction and that’s hard! Ever since we took control of how we would be marketed to, marketers have struggled with this. We dress up all nice in our best suit to wait and hope the pretty girl asks us to dance.

THIS IS THE FUNDAMENTAL CHALLENGE OF PERMISSION

MARKETING We put up websites with the best graphics words and hope that someone clicks. But just like fishing, we'll be most successful if we have lots of lines in the water, and we drop our lines into the best streams. Online, that means SEO.

GOT LUNCH?

Search Engine Optimization is a subject with enough material to cover a month's worth of lunchtime discussions. My goal here today is that you gain an understanding of a couple of principles but I’m not going to attempt even overview here of everything involved with SEO.

KEYWORDS ? You probably get the basics: Keywords are the words and phrases that people enter into a search engine in order to find your website. But since Google indexes every word on the website, what’s the difference between any word and a keyword?

Google: #2 #3 #4

Just because you didn't identify a certain phrase as a keyword doesn't mean that it can't be found in a search. The strategy with keywords is to find words that you don't rank high for and then work on them. We don't need to focus on developing the keyword "point of choice" because we already rank high.

FOCUS?

You work on a keyword by focusing on it. Start by working those words into the copy on your pages. Going further, make it the gist of a page. If something like “market segmentation and modeling” is something you want to focus on, make a page about it and link to other pages on the subject.

LINK BUILDING

Which brings me to my second element of SEO that I’d like to talk about is link building. If you thought anything else I talked about sounded hard, link building is harder. There are lots of factors that Google considers when ranking your page. Most important among them is who is linking to you.

THE MIDDLE SCHOOL CONUNDRUM

Willingness to be Friends

How Cool the Kid Is

Google figures that if a site links to you, then they’re in a sense, voting for your content. Google takes into account not just the number of links, but who is doing the linking. It's kind of like middle school. You can tell who the cool kids are by the kids that hang out with them. Unfortunately, as most of us know, it's hard to get the cool kids to like you.

BE GREAT SHARE THE LOVE MAKE NEWS

How to get the cool kids to like you…

There are four things you can do to help develop links. First, create great content - stuff people will want to link to. Second, put links to other sites on your site - people are inclined to link to you if you link to them first! And, be newsworthy so they feel they have to link to you

HOW CAN YOU MAKE NEWS?

Two of the steps are easy. We have great content and we can set up links, but the third step is tricky. How can you make news?

RECAP

Find your Rendezvous and drive your traffic there

Be great … make news

Don’t go to the dance without a date