Inbound Marketing Blog

Last week, I attended HubSpot’s Inbound 2014 Conference in Boston and let me say - there was a LOT to take away from it. Whether it was the vision of David Meerman Scott, the ground-breaking announcements from Brian Halligan or the downright folksy slang from Marcus Sheridan, just about every session had some key takeaways.

But this conference was more than just sessions. It was the entire Inbound Marketing experience. The people, the sessions, the food, the ideas, the stories - all of it made Inbound 2014 an incredible conference to be at.

In this post, I’ll go through 3-5 takeaways from some of the sessions I attended. I’ll finish up with some overall takeaways and some discussion on the entire experience. Here we go.

This is going to be some sort of special MozCon review post. Four of us are contributing, and this is a lengthy post, but there’s great stuff here. And at the very end we’ve included links to other MozCon 2014 reviews.

For all you HubSpot users out there, you may have noticed a considerable change in the blog tool. Blogging is an extremely important part of Inbound Marketing so this change is worth discussing and explaining so that HubSpot users (or future HubSpot users) can leverage this to their own benefit.

When it comes to building meaningful relationships with existing and potential customers, it's vital that you have the systems in place to provide the right information at the right time. Having too many marketing tools to deal with leads to inefficiency and you ultimately damage the relationships you're trying to nurture. Luckily for many forward-thinking businesses, HubSpot came along to streamline inbound marketing processes and make it easier for businesses to attract genuine leads and convert prospects into customers. But things are about to get even better.

If you're the owner of a company operating in or around Vancouver, you'll know how much of a struggle it can be to attract the right customers to your business, especially with so much competition in every sector. The British Columbia economy is still on fairly fragile ground and Vancouver business owners know this all too well. In order to be found by prospective buyers looking for a business just like yours, you need a sales and marketing plan that is appropriate for the digital age, and you need the right tools to help your business grow. This is where HubSpot comes in.

As I am sitting here thinking about what to write, all I can think about is how excited I am about this new experience with LocalTrifecta. The past three months I have experienced a lot of life changes such as graduating college, then understanding how it feels being an unemployed degree holder, moving out of my childhood house to a new part of town, and lastly - willingly starting CrossFit for the first time, where you basically sign on the dotted line to get your butt kicked on the daily basis. But then, all these series of events had led me to the office of LocalTrifecta.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to marketing. There’s the conventional/ traditional school of marketing. And there’s the new school of marketing.

The conventional school of marketing would have you believe that the only real way to get your business in front of people is to place ads, buy email lists and make phone calls. The new (and cool) school of marketing would tell you that to get yourself in front of your target audience, you need to be in the business of producing content that solves your ideal buyers’ problems and answers their questions.

I’m not here to tell you what is right or what is wrong. Both have a place in marketing budgets in companies all over the world.

But what this post will do is give you a fair, honest comparison - I want this blog post to give you an idea of what each is so that you’ll be ready to assess what you ought to include in your own marketing budget.

Inbound Marketing blogs are becoming a go-to resource for marketers and business owners looking online for cost effective ways to grow their business. A good Inbound marketing blog will show you how to harness the power of non-paid channels such as content, social media, and SEO.  

Searching “Inbound Marketing Blogs,” on Google will show you the 17 best inbound marketing blogs, 25 Great Inbound Marketing Blogs, or even 39 Fantastic Inbound Marketing Blogs.

But who has the time to review that many blogs?

In this post, I’ll simplify things, providing details on the 5 inbound marketing blogs that will teach you everything you need to know about the latest in inbound marketing.

I have a confession to make… I’m not fond of Google AdWords’ Quality Score calculation, on a good day. From what I gather from digital marketers the world over, I’m not alone in my belief.

The idea itself is a great one—a way to filter and rank advertisers for similar goods and services in Google’s AdWords auction—so that the advertiser with the highest bid doesn’t automatically win each auction. It’s intended to effectively eliminate a monopoly on ad space that would be waged between deep-pocketed corporations (although some would say, with good authority, it too often is a battle of the titans).

Avinash Kaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google, recently wrote a  LinkedIn Influencers article stating social media is still well behind organic search and email for customer acquisition. He uses U.S. data, but his findings are worth noting for other countries. Organic search outperformed the combined results of Facebook and Twitter by over 15%. Also impressive, email marketing outperformed the social networking duo by 6%.