What Is Inbound Marketing

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Inbound, pull, magnetic or bread trail are marketing terms that describe guiding customers to your doorstep.

I find the term “Inbound” a bit confusing because no marketing can ever be purely inbound, because it has to go outbound first, put into the ether or outside world, before it can ever be found or guide people inbound to you. This is what Direct Response Marketing was always about in the offline world long before the internet came along so its not really a new idea just a blend of results orientated marketing.

We call it bread trail because what you are actually doing is leaving small tasty bites for somebody to follow, which leads a path to your product or service, but I will talk about that some more in a later blog post.

The use of the term “Inbound Marketing” has been primarily driven in recent years by the launch of an online software tool set from HubSpot based in the US a few years ago.

On-line Marketing History

Marketing has been historically a service driven offering, but with so much selling and marketing transitioning to the on-line stage and the need for more effective (results orientated) sales and marketing a new wave of “web experts” appeared on the scene.

The problems with those “web experts” was that they tended to be good at one thing, lets say Company “X” is good at SEO while Company “Y” is good at website design and Company “Z” is good at social media.

This leaves the business struggling to connect all these fragmented marketing pieces and processes together from different suppliers which resulted in lower than expected results.

Web Marketing Software – A Big Part Of On-line Marketing History

More software tools appeared on the scene, mostly aimed at helping the “web expert” do analysis and research along with content management systems and frameworks to automate and integrate the work involved to some extent.

These tools were typically point tools as opposed to work-flow tools in that they were designed to be very good at a specific job as opposed to the whole process. In the past they were (and many stil are) licensed to a PC like most software tools, but many are now transitioning into the cloud (running on hardware in internet cyberspace) where they are offered as a service on-line.

Hubspot and their Website and Blog Grader are a set of on-line tools to automate some of this work and provide some kind of work-flow in the case of Hubspot itself. It is similar to a number of tools already established on the market, but where many of these tools were aimed at web experts Hubspot is aimed to simplify the process and make it more friendly for the less “web aware” and to provide some guiding force for the DIY web enthusiasts among us.

It can also be operated and run from anywhere in the world as its an online or cloud service.

Hubspot Website Grader provides you with an overall effectiveness score and some results of its actual site analysis.

I actually ran an analysis on this site and got a website effectiveness score of 90%, but what does that actually mean ?

On Page Factors Affect Your Websites Effectiveness

On page factors are the starting block in determine your effectiveness for the same reason that when two people meet there are certain factors they need to determine how to relate to each other and how effective a relationship maybe. Humans rely mainly on our senses which relate to sight, sound, touch and emotion. Based on these factors we can decide what sex, age, style, interests, religion, colour, creed and a whole bunch of other factors make up people from which we make a decision about a relationship in our business and personal lives.

Well first the Website Grader looks at basic on-page factors which are technical components that search engines use to determine what your site is relevant for and how it should be catalogued.

This starts with meta data which are blocks of code that signify and describe what your site is about to the outside world in terms that search engines understand.

Then it moves on to look at the use of headings and subheadings which should break your message up into easier to read slices of information and also looks at your use of images to support your text and their associated tags which describe them to search engines.

Next there is a scan of some of your interior pages (pages that are effectively below the main page, like chapters in a book) which link directly from the main or front page of your site, again to see whether basic technical factors are in place.

Lastly, it even tries to assess the simplicity of language used to determine whether your message is easy to understand.

But this is only one side of the equation.

Off Page Factors Affect Your Websites Effectiveness Also

Next it looks at off page factors which are the road signs that reveal more about your site and point the way to further determining the overall effectiveness of your website and how its seen by the internet world.

The age of your domain (your sites maturity and longevity), its google page rank (how relevant google determines it to be), the number of indexed pages (which chapters did the search engines like), when it was last crawled (when a search engine read it last), your Alexa rank (how much traffic you get to your site) – incidently this one is in the top 2.5% in the world.

Links which point to your site from relevant places are also important. This is quite complex and important as well as misunderstood and Website Grader gives you a taste (you can guess why), but it does include social media and directory sites.

It even gives an indication of whether your traffic is being converted (turned into an action or sales) by some mechanism such as providing RSS feeds for reading or forms for requesting and downloading information.

And finally it you filled in your competitors sites it will give you some indication of how you compare to your competitors.

All in all an interesting, stable, easy to use and quick insight into the basics of your websites effectiveness. It’s worth pointing out that some of this information can also be obtained from Googles Webmaster tools and a bunch of other places on-line if you care to search around.

Like all knowledge though it can be very dangerous and misleading in the wrong hands so don’t go making too many decisions based in this alone, but it should help you to dig out the crooks in the website and SEO world.

Or you can use it as a starting point for building a better website yourself using HubSpots work-flow tool-set which aims to make creating a more effective website easier.

Strangely I did try running the analysis on a number of other sites but Website Grader had problems with those which I think was down to some security implementation we had made.

Once you’ve done your research you can start building.

The main HubSpot software (an integrated framework) aims to keep you close to building relevant content and obtaining conversions (traffic and leads) and getting your website setup as quickly as possible.

It has a wizard for extracting content such as your logo from your current website and then guides you through the page building process which is kind of like many of the web 2.0 tools for page building from Squidoo or HubPages where you build a page from a series of modules which can contain text, graphics and video etc. so you don’t have to know the web html/php/java code required to get it to work for you.

Building pages that convert (getting traffic and leads) and tracking links and other components automatically, writing content that is related to specific keywords and spreading your content and getting back links while you measure your effectiveness is what it’s all about. With the end results being a measurable return on investment (ROI) from on-line marketing activities.

There are two products; The first has its own content management system and is a closed system (does not integrate with other products). The other is a more open framework which does integrate with other content management systems and applications which is especially good for customers who already have a website built around a CMS already in place.

The benefit to all of this is empowerment, giving people more involvement and control over their on-line marketing.

It’s primarily aimed at B2B (business to business) service companies or B2C (business to consumer) with high sales value so may not lend itself well to e-commerce type environments.

There are some weaknesses in the areas of keyword research, data structuring and back-link building, but that is where you would need somebody who know what they are doing to get the most out of the software.

Bottom line is I like the idea of the software and see many of the advantages of making the whole process simpler and more effective and combined with other sales and marketing services it could be a powerful combination.