The days of outbound marketing are over.

Inbound Marketing has become the new way of life if you want to be more than just a fly by night company. In today’s digital world we have a new customer. A customer that researches what their needs are and then seeks out what they want. To help you learn how to accommodate this new customer and incorporate your own digital marketing strategy, we have provided a thought provoking list of marketing quotes from inbound marketing experts across different industries.

 Harneet Bhalla 

 Excellent advice from Harneet at TedX. Harneet Bhalla, a Thought Leader in the space of Marketing. An eloquent speaker at multiple forums and conferences including TEDx, IIT Bombay & written blogs on various marketing specifically Digital approaches. Harneet is known to uncover hidden marketing opportunities for multiple brands.

“In the online world, the user’s attention is spread across multiple screens like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat & others. The essence is attention and then it boils down to various strategies to gain this attention. What is the future of Marketing? It’s awesome times ahead. You’ll see smaller brands winning over the well-known brands because of authenticity & their upfront attitude.”

    Jordan Harling     

Jordan Harling is Marketing Executive at Roman Blinds Direct. Jordan Harling has been a professional marketing consultant since 2011, working across a number of sectors including charity, digital and ecommerce.

“Marketing in the 21st century is interesting because of how dynamic it has been. Compare the tactics that successful companies are using now to the ones that were successful even ten years ago – when social media was still in its infancy and the iPhone was still yet to kickstart the smartphone boom. As consumers have become more proficient with and more dependant on the internet, we’ve seen marketing companies shift focus from offline channels to online.
Primarily this has taken the form of social media, Facebook and Twitter being the two most commonly used with more engaging brands using Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube and the like. But we’re starting to see that these channels aren’t the best for engagement (email still provides the best ROI here). What they are important for though is your brand, social media has become the face of companies – brands are being defined by their online presence and how responsive they are to customer’s needs. The power dynamic has been completely flipped and now the customer is in control.

This trend doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon either. As people are becoming more technologically savvy and becoming more informationally-aware, they’re expecting more from brands and companies. What we’re going to see in the future is companies not advertising their products, but advertising the idea of their products, the experience, the attitude. We’ve already seen the beginning of this with things Dove’s Real Beauty adverts, and it’s going to continue.”

Yuval Maoz

Yuval Maoz is Head of Marketing at Klear, a leading influencer marketing platform.

“Today’s audience requires a more personal marketing. Targeting a client by their general characteristics or the sites they visited is far from enough. Catching the audience’s attention goes by providing immediate value, that can come as entertainment, guides, or stories.“Marketing today is about experiences, not products.

People seek the first-person experience. They don’t wait for a brand’s new catalog. They want to see how the new collection looks on someone they respect their opinion. That’s why social media influencers are trending today. Brands fast adopted influencers, the updated version of word-of-mouth marketing for the new century.

Social media feeds host our new circle of friends, and they are full of first-person recommendations. Influencer marketing helped brands to step away from promoting their products through their own channels and look pushy. Instead, they reach their target audience across diversified channels, especially with individuals who gained influence and people truly care about what they share.”

 Alert1 

 James Lester is a marketing associate at Alert1, a personal safety technology firm dedicated to helping seniors stay safe and independent. He has a degree in business information technologies and e-commerce, and minor in Japanese language and culture. James values quality time with his grandparents and wants to bring families closer together with Alert1.

“In today’s day and age, digital marketing is growing and will continue to grow.  More and more of our resources and tools are becoming online, but that isn’t to say that offline marketing is dead. Television and radio broadcasting are still major players in the marketing world. Global ad-spend in 2015 for television was 40.2% in 2015. Many people still read newspapers, watch TV, and listen to the radio making those great avenues to reach customers. But to reach the largest audiences it is best to use both offline and online marketing.

Search engine optimization is the best place to start since it is free. Optimize your website’s pages for relevant keywords and watch your traffic increase as you climb higher to position number one on a Google site search. Outreach to gain authority links and increase your domain authority to rank higher on Google. This will also help you show up closer to position number one on an organic Google search. SEO is the easiest and most effective way to drive traffic to your website. (And it’s free!)

If utilized correctly, social media can be used to reach thousands of people at no cost and minimum maintenance.  Share relevant content a few times a day on twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram and watch your online presence grow. No matter what your product is, it is important to use online resources.”

Bob Clary

 Bob Clary is Director of Marketing for DevelopIntelligence. He is also a brand strategist, blogger, social media guru and technical geek, who brings marketing campaigns to life and creates buzz around them to really stand out.

“The greatest asset of inbound marketing is it can be additive to anything you are doing at the outbound end. It’s a terrific way to creative “passive” leads simply by creating content targeted at your specific audience. It’s why so many companies are now deploying “thought leadership” campaigns aimed at building credibility in a given subject matter. It’s also something that can be easily outsourced – many freelance writers exist who can craft blogs, social media posts, and other content pieces at rates well below what you’d have to pay a full-time hire. There’s never been a better time to focus on inbound marketing than right now.”

Pierre de Braux

 Pierre de Braux is a content strategist at Spiralytics, a full-service performance marketing agency. He helps brands create valuable content that engages and builds trust with their audiences. When he’s not at work, he pines for a faster internet connection so he can watch cat videos in high definition.

“Let’s face it, your brand’s prospects are consuming more content online than any other media channel. Almost half the planet goes online regularly and the trend is continuing as mobile adoption keeps growing. The term “Inbound Marketing” gets thrown around quite a lot these days, but that’s because it makes up a huge portion of what digital marketers do. At one point, it was only really relevant to SaaS companies and brands that operated predominantly online, but now, it’s applicable to virtually everyone.

More importantly, a significant percentage of consumers conduct research online before making a purchase decision, and they’re usually looking for a reason why they should choose one product over another. Inbound marketing provides that reason through education, trust, and relationship building.

Why is digital marketing easy to outsource? Mainly because you don’t have to invest in starting a marketing team on your own (which can be quite demanding in terms of time and cost). Not building your own team means you can start quickly and you don’t have to worry about:

Jonathan Tylor

 Here is Jonathan Tylor from Klipfolio! And they are 100% Inbound focused.

“Here’s the thing: inbound takes time. We live in an age of instant gratification and growth hacks; business owners want big results, and they want them today. Who can blame them? Success stories of growth hacks abound and fill us with envy.“If you’re serious about growing your business, you must consider inbound marketing.. Every business is different, but if you’re looking to grow at scale then inbound marketing may be your key to success.
But this gets to the heart of inbound. Inbound is like planting a tree: a small plant can grow into a huge tree given time and nourishment. It can stand the test of time, outlasting growth hacks and providing businesses with sustainable growth.”

 Nick Leffler

 Nick Leffler helps people and small businesses expand their online presence with his experience building websites, social media presence and more. Nick has grown his online presence with a small marketing budget by using methods such as blogging, organic social media reach, and email marketing.

“Inbound marketing opens you up to a larger audience who has qualified themselves to you if you are creating well targeted inbound marketing content. Marketing is all about knowing your audience and targeting them. Inbound marketing goes beyond targeting them by getting leads to pre-qualify for your product or service.”“Inbound marketing is a great place in the sales process to bring qualified leads in. That’s because a person has a problem that they’re looking for a solution for. If you are helping them already then it’s a natural step that they would consult with you for the full solution.”

 Twenty Over Ten

 Twenty Over Ten is a start-up currently leading the financial industry in empowering financial advisors to build beautiful & unique websites creating a more powerful system for inbound leads. Twenty Over Ten has been in the market since 2014 and launched publicly January 2017. They currently serve hundreds of clients throughout the nation and are projected to make even greater leaps and bounds over the next few years.

“How do you get inbound leads? You give away some of your knowledge and expertise for free. We’re not talking about offering free initial phone calls or consultations (although those can be valuable). We are talking about the “Freemium” Business model (which, if you haven’t figured it out already, comes from the two words free and premium). Including multiple calls to action in your free content can also help to drive more client traffic to your paid services, which in the end is the main goal of offering free services in the first place. The importance of calls to action are discussed further in one of our latest blog posts here. A good call to action can measure success by turning leads in to clients.”

  James Pollard

 James Pollard is an inbound marketing consultant who works specifically within the financial services industry over at TheAdvisorCoach.com.

“You should focus on inbound marketing because it allows you to pull in people who are, by definition, warm prospects for you. They are already receptive to your message and are ready to do business with someone. You just have to make sure that is you, whether through your online content, email funnel, etc. Hubspot is a great inbound marketing tool because you can manage everything from a single location. Inbound marketing is incredibly valuable to B2B companies because it relies on content that can be made available online. This is important because people at a company may not respond to a cold call or mail solicitation. However, when the need arises for a particular product or service, it’s almost an unspoken rule that they do online research. When that happens, you want to be in front of them.”

 Kathryn Kosmides

 Kathryn Kosmides, Director of Marketing + Growth Hacker at SummitSync.

“Which means I personally had to pivot from a mobile app marketer to a B2B SaaS marketer and have learned so much along the way. I’ve known for years that content marketing is king; but didn’t realize until recently the most important part of successful B2B marketing is actually distribution. So, if content marketing is king, content distribution is queen.“Recently, we’ve pivoted from a mobile-only company to a full B2B SaaS company. We went from helping ambitious individuals to helping entire sales and marketing teams measure and maximize their return on event.

Someone can spend hours upon hours researching, crafting, and honing a fabulous piece of content. They publish and start the waiting game… As I heard on a great Kissmetrics webinar featuring Andy Crestodina yesterday, “the party only happens if you invite people to the party.

My biggest tip is to get other people involved in your content creation asking them for a quote, doing a round-up post, or asking for their feedback prior to publishing. They are then invested into your content and you can easily ask them to share it on their social feeds, newsletters, etc… To have a successful inbound content strategy as a B2B, SaaS, or really any type of business, invite other people to the table. Share a meal instead of throwing a party no one got the invite to.“

Bradley Shaw

Bradley Shaw is an SEO Expert Brad Inc. Digital Marketing and Online Consulting Expert Since 1997.

“When you have the right tools in place, data sharing is smooth, and reporting becomes much easier. Product creep occurs; you’ve got multiple systems duct-taped together — making associates waste time entering data into multiple systems or hacking along a fix to get the metrics”“Decrease frustration and grow inbound sales with the proper inbound marketing tools. We have been using HubSpot for a few years and have never looked back. Once our sales, marketing and service teams were able to give attention to their core expertise, amazing things happened for our business. We removed the aggravation our team felt creating workarounds that take time and energy far away from their passion for serving customers and growing the company.”

 Josh Oakes

 Josh Oakes is a Content Writer at IT Glue.

“If there’s one piece of advice I’d give to a company just starting an inbound program, it’s to start early. Most sources cite 12-18 months for an inbound program to really start paying off, which sounds about right. We started putting the team together before we really needed the program, which was really important to flesh out the roles and get everybody up to speed.
Now the team is firing on all cylinders, right at the time that inbound is starting to take off. That first year is an opportunity to not only build up a library of content, but to refine your messaging, and to learn best practices for testing and data collection.“As a SaaS company in the B2B space, we’ve put a lot of emphasis on building our inbound program. In a niche B2B space, you have to maximize every lead. There’s people you just can’t reach at events or through social ads.
You need to have different ways to get to them and that’s what inbound allows you to do. Inbound creates a smoother lead gen cycle – you need inbound to keep your sales team busy during those times of the year when outbound lead gen is quieter. We’ve been using Hubspot to manage a lot of our inbound work. It keeps everything organized – website, blog, social – all in one place. It’s great for inbound, and it’s been easy to scale with it, as we add different roles in content creation and digital marketing.”

Danielle Kunkle

Danielle Kunkle is a co-founder at Boomer Benefits, an agency that specializes in Medigap plan. Her agency has been using inbound marketing for years to grow their traffic.

“I’ve learned along the way that you have to put yourself in their shoes. Is this post easy to read? Does it solve a problem? If I include a lead magnet -is it helpful or is it annoying? Read your content back to yourself and ask yourself whether you would get to the bottom of that post if you were a prospective client who found this article. That’s the key to writing content that works.
The reason inbound marketing is right for us is that our prospective clients really need to learn a lot about their Medicare benefits first before they are even ready to think about the supplemental products we sell. We’ve capitalized on this by using content marketing to educate them on the basics first. People are so grateful to have this confusing topic explained to them that you earn their trust while they are reading the basics. You can demonstrate the depth of your knowledge and this makes them feel comfortable to then also learn about and buy supplemental products from us.”

  Jasmine Ashton

Jasmine Ashton is a digital strategist at Fieldtrip, the 7th largest advertising agency in Louisville

 ”Inbound marketing, I’ve learned, is like meeting a person for the first time. It involves seeking out information about the person, getting to know them, and what makes them tick. From there, we can start to authentically lead them into us; rather than having to blast information at them and hope it peaks their interest. People creating authentic connections between themselves and brands they like, a trend that is becoming more mainstream, is often initiated through inbound marketing because it is the consumer doing the heavy lifting. Recognizing this tactic allows marketers to initiate mutually beneficial connections between brands and consumers.”

  Kali Hawlk

 Kali Hawlk has been providing inbound marketing services for financial advisors for the last 4 years and understands how valuable content is for expanding reach, gaining influence, and getting clients.

“Content is critical for financial planning firms, especially those who want to work with younger clients. Why? Because 1 in 4 Millennials doesn’t trust anyone for financial advice. 

They don’t trust their friends. They don’t trust their parents. And they certainly don’t trust some financial advisor within the industry.

Kate Neuens

Kate Neuens has been in SEO and digital marketing for over 5 years, working in higher education at Harvard University, and also working in the insurance, legal, and finance fields. 

“I’ve learned from working in the inbound marketing world is that you need to be focused on the customer. What do they have questions about? What do they need help with? What are their frustrations? And then you can frame your marketing strategy around answering those questions and how your product can help your potential customers. You need to be there where your customers are and that channel can differ from industry to industry, but if you’re providing informative and useful information your customers need, you’re on the right track.“

  Xavier Major

 Xavier Major CVO Acceleration Director of Marketing

“Inbound marketing is like fishing, you can’t catch fish without a worm, hook, and pole. The content you produce is the worm and the value you provide is the hook and your business is the pole. In order to compete in the marketplace where consumers have so many options, you must stand out using the content to prove you are the best. Business has become more complex because there are so many options for consumers in the marketplace. In order to stand out, you need to provide value upfront to prove your the best at what you do.This sparked the rise of inbound marketing.”

 Colin Bovet

Colin Bovet, Head of Marketing and Partnerships at Enplug.com

“Yet with inbound marketing, once you’ve built up an inbound marketing machine with valuable content and a strong conversion funnel, you’ll attract a steady stream of leads to your site. Investing in inbound marketing is investing into an asset that will produce value for your business for years to come. With paid search, outbound email outreach, or trade shows, you stop getting results as soon as you stop spending money.”

  Jameson Slattery

 Jameson Slattery, Vice President of Global Marketing here at Colorescience. Jameson has an extensive marketing and business background, with an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, and previous marketing experience with Apple, Visa, and Provide Commerce.

 “Don’t Discount the Value of SEO –In my experience, search engine optimization (SEO) is an integral part of any successful inbound marketing strategy. It is imp ortant to position your website in a way that Google can crawl, understand, and index in their search engine results.

Specifically, Keyword Mapping – there are so many SEO tactics, but one that I have found to be particularly successful is keyword mapping. This tactic helps Google understand what a webpage is about. Keyword mapping is the process of identifying the keyword universe for any given industry and leveraging certain keywords that align with your businesses goals to specific page assets on your website. There are many ways to pin keywords to specific webpages, but the most common ways are in the H1, on-page copy, and meta-data such as the title tags. Placing the right keywords in the right places will have a big impact on how a webpage ranks.”

 Chasen Nick

Chasen Nick is the Digital Marketing Strategist for RAMS Home Loans, one of Australia’s largest lenders for first time home buyers.

“Inbound marketing has worked incredibly well for our brand. One of the main reasons is that our customers have a lot of questions about home loans. We’re able to use the buyer’s journey in order to provide them with the information they’re looking for before they even make it to the sales department. The knowledge center on our website is filled with helpful information for prospective home buyers. In many cases, we’re giving our prospects answers to questions they didn’t even know they had. As a result, we’re considered an authority on home loans. This has lead to a loyal following and many more leads.”

 Tracy Julien

 

Tracy Julien works with GuidedChoice, a retirement planning and advice company based out of San Diego, she is VP of Marketing who has over 15 years of experience in consumer marketing.

“Users Crave Updated Content – create blog posts that are applicable to your current and potential clients. This helps to give your consumers better insight into your industry, and the more relevant the content is, the more valuable it will be to the consumer.Users Crave Updated Content an imperative learning takeaway from using inbound marketing is that the content a company uses has to be constantly updated and relevant to the end consumer, due to the fast-paced nature of the online world.

Invite Direct Feedback – updating old blog posts with more current information is a great way to keep them relevant or by inviting direct feedback, whether positive or negative, from consumers. If a few of your blog posts on a certain topic aren’t doing especially well, combine them into one expert post that only mentions all the most helpful tips from each.

Twitter as a Supplement – social media accounts, such as Twitter, are a great tool to use but only as a supplement to your main efforts, which should be focused more on generating content, rather than just solely Twitter itself.

Users Are Looking for Answers – online users find a lot of inbound marketing materials because they are looking for answers. It is vital to stay abreast of content that is trending or that is being searched around and then be proactive in creating articles based on these topics.

Stay Abreast of the Competition – look at the competition in your industry or even the services your own company offers to come up with content that relieves a recurring issue or pattern that is noticeable. This not only helps to build your current brand recognition, it also will be yet another avenue for your site to capture new visitors and sales.

Steve Chipman is co-founder of CRM Switch. He is a CRM and inbound marketing consultant. Steve helps companies achieve greater sales and marketing synergy at both business and technological levels. He assists with assembling and analyzing sales and marketing data, which allows clients to make more informed decisions. To paraphrase Seth Godin, inbound marketing is about continually trying things that might not work. That perfectly keyword-optimized, epic blog post could easily fall flat. Keep stepping up to the plate day after day, knowing you may only get a hit 25 to 30% of the time.”

Kevin Sides

Kevin Sides, CMO at Shipmonk

“It works, especially if you have a longer sales cycle. Most people like to do their homework, whether it’s reading a few reviews or watching YouTube videos. The best brand understand that and know where to insert their messaging seamlessly. From eBooks to How Tos, unless your brand is an impulse buy, you’ll benefit from building an inbound framework that can scale with your growth.”

 William Gadea

 William Gadea is the Founder and Creative Director of IdeaRocket, a maker of animated videos for business.

“We use both inbound and outbound channels, and one of the things that I appreciate about the inbound is that the sales cycle is a lot shorter. When we reach out to prospects via email, say, we don’t usually catch them right when they need our services (unless we’re exceptionally lucky.) From there on, it will usually be a months-long game of checking in to stay top-of-mind. With inbound, the sales cycle is a lot more painless. They usually knock on the door (virtually speaking) just when they’re ready to buy.”

There you have it folks. Wisdom gained by the experience of 25 professionals who successfully utilize inbound marketing in their prospective field. It doesn’t matter weather you are a startup in need of getting your name out or a company that has been around for a while wanting to learn more, assistance is just a click away.