10
Flip the Demand Generation Formula—Get Buyers to Find You

Have you been cold-called in the past six months? Did you enjoy the experience? Did you engage with the salesperson? Did you buy the product?

Have you recently received an unsolicited piece of direct mail or email? Did you open it? Did you like receiving it? Did you buy the product that was promoted?

Have you conducted a Google search to research a product in the past six months? Did you enjoy the process? Did you make a purchase?

Have you heard about a product in social media from people you trust? Did you look into the product? Did you end up buying it?

I have posed those questions to hundreds of audiences over the years. Some were MBA students. Some were doctors and lawyers. Some were tech entrepreneurs. Some were realtors. Regardless of the audience, the results of the survey are always the same. Very few hands go up when folks are asked whether a cold call or unsolicited email instigated a purchase. Almost all of the hands go up when people are asked whether a Google search or social media discussion influenced a purchase.

Buyers get annoyed with the interruptive tactics referred to in the first two sets of questions. At HubSpot, we call these tactics “outbound marketing.” Outbound marketing just doesn't work anymore. Buyers dislike outbound marketing so much that they actually invest in technology to keep these tactics out of their lives. Buyers add themselves to the Do Not Call Registry. Buyers use DVRs to fast-forward through television commercials. Buyers keep unsolicited email out of their inboxes with spam blockers.

Today's buyers are empowered by the Internet. They are empowered by Google and social media. At HubSpot, we refer to these channels as “inbound marketing.” Buyers do not need to talk to a salesperson, read an advertisement, or visit a booth at a trade show.

Buyers can be bored at home on a Saturday night and start researching the problems they are experiencing at work. This action is the start of the modern sales and marketing funnel.

Ironically, when I pose these same survey questions to sales and marketing executives, asking them where their companies are spending their sales and marketing dollars, the results are quite different.

“How much are you spending on outbound marketing, such as cold-calling, direct mail, advertising, and trade shows?”

Many people are embarrassed about the amount of money they are throwing away on these tactics.

“How much are you spending on inbound marketing, such as SEO, social media participation, and blogging?”

Many people are spending next to nothing.

Despite the shift from outbound marketing to inbound marketing that is so obvious when viewing the situation as a buyer, for whatever reason, companies are very slow to react. Companies watch the effectiveness of outbound marketing tactics decline. Companies watch the effectiveness of inbound marketing tactics increase. Yet companies continue to pour the majority of their demand generation efforts into outbound marketing.

Don't make this mistake. Invest in inbound marketing. Help buyers find you.

How Can Your Business Rank at the Top of Google?

There are hundreds of phrases for which every business owner would give their left arm in order to rank at the top of Google. The potential impact to their business is enormous.

How do you do it? How do you get your business to the top of Google for the words and phrases that your best-fit buyers are searching for?

Let's review a brief history of search engine ranking algorithms. You may recall that Google was not the first search engine. Do you remember Alta Vista and Excite? They were among the first movers in the search engine industry. These early search engines would read certain elements of a web page called metadata. These elements, such as meta-keywords, meta-descriptions, and page titles, are not always visible to a user. The first wave of search engines would simply search for these elements on a web page (i.e., “crawl the web page”) and rank the search results based on the meta-content of the websites.

At first glance, this sounds like a logical approach. However, web marketers started to figure out how to cheat the system. They would put high traffic words like “baseball” in their meta-keywords just to attract traffic to their website. Over time, these tactics became known as “black hat” tactics. As these tactics became more popular and people became pros at “tricking” the search engine into ranking their website for a given term, the relevance of the search results to the original search terms declined substantially. The core value of search engines was being compromised.

Then Google came along. When devising its search engine, Google asked, “What attribute of a website can we use to automatically determine the website's relevance and authority?” Its conclusion was “inbound links.” An inbound link is a hyperlink on another website that directs back to your website. I am sure you have seen many hyperlinks. They look like this: www.yourwebsite.com. Google figured that if a website had a lot of other people linking to it, the website being linked to must be pretty important. It is really hard to wake up one day, start a website, and immediately convince thousands of people to link back to it. To make the algorithm even more effective, Google was also able to factor in the importance of the website that was linking back to your website. For example, a link from the Wall Street Journal would be thousands of times more impactful than a link from your 16-year-old nephew's personal blog.

In addition to the quality and quantity of inbound links, the rise of social media has caused Google to factor social media influence into the algorithm. If your blog articles are often retweeted in social media, if your company's Twitter account has lots of followers, if your company's Facebook page has lots of fans, Google will pay attention. Just like inbound links, it is hard to fake a large following and lots of engagement with your content. If lots of people follow you and lots of people share your content across social media channels, Google figures there is a good chance you are a thought leader on a given topic and ranks you prominently in the search engine results for that topic.

In a nutshell, that is how search engines work. You need lots of inbound links. You need lots of social media authority. You cannot fake your way through it. You need to build your websites authentically. If you accomplish these goals, you will be found often by qualified prospects in Google. The demand for your business will grow exponentially. Your business will be changed forever.

At this point, you may be asking, “But how do I achieve these goals? How do I organically get a lot of inbound links from other websites? How do I organically build a large social media following?”

Here are the two simple actions you need to take in order to drive inbound links and social media following:

Create quality content (e.g., blogs, ebooks, webinars) on a frequent basis.
Participate in the social media discussions in which your target prospects are already conversing.

That's it. This simple strategy will modernize your demand generation strategy. It will align your business with the habits of the modern buyer. It will get your business found by the prospects you care about most. Not only will you start generating lots of traffic from Google, you will also start developing a valuable social media following. You will start to amass a sizable blog subscriber list. Prospects will start to give you their email so you can continue to send them the valuable content you now regularly produce. These actions of blogging, quality content production, and social media participation to drive qualified Google search traffic is the foundation of inbound marketing. It is the cornerstone of getting your business found when and where your prospects are searching.

This Does Not Happen Overnight

One major mistake companies make when embarking on this journey is a lack of commitment. They set up a blog and social media accounts for the company. They write three blog articles. They promote their articles on their social media accounts. Nothing happens. They think, “Maybe inbound marketing doesn't work for my business?”

It will. You just need more time. We often draw an analogy between this style of demand generation and weight loss. If you have a goal to lose 10 pounds, you do not hit the gym three times in the first week and lose the 10 pounds. In fact, you probably remain the same weight. However, if you keep it up three times a week for a few months, you start to lose weight. You begin to feel better. Working out becomes part of your routine. You can no longer imagine a week without getting to the gym a few times. You may even start going every day. Your life is changed—for the better—for as long as you maintain the routine.

The same holds true for inbound marketing. You may not see results after that first week. However, if you create content and participate in social media a few times a week for a few months, you will start to see results. The routine will become ingrained in your broader marketing process. You can no longer imagine a week without creating content and participating in social media. You may even do it more often. Your marketing is changed—for the better—for as long as you maintain the routine.

Commit to the process.

Create a Content Production Process

Every year, I speak to many audiences on the aforementioned concepts of inbound marketing. Afterwards, CEOs approach me. “Mark, I loved the speech. Thanks. I made a note to start blogging twice per week.”

I smile, excited that I inspired them, and respond, “I appreciate the kind words. Unfortunately, I bet you won't keep it up.”

“What?! But wasn't that the whole idea, Mark? Wasn't the point of your talk to transform my behavior?”

Yes, but CEOs are busy. Executives are busy. Salespeople are busy. They work long hours. Their time is in demand and they get pulled in many directions. They may get through the first week or two, but then a new priority arises and the content production comes to a halt.

As an executive, don't think about taking on these tasks yourself. Think instead about creating a content production process. Delegate the process to specialists. That is your job here. Building your content production team is not easy. But once you have the team in place, the hard part is over.

Let's go back to our weight loss analogy. You cannot call up your trainer one day and say, “Hey, I can't make it in to the gym today. Could you bang out a workout for me?” That doesn't work. However, you can get some help with your content production.

There is one key resource of the content production process—the journalist. Journalists hold the keys to the future of demand generation! Nobody recognizes this opportunity, not even the journalists themselves. Take advantage. Your job as an executive is to develop this journalistic capability within your company to drive the modern demand generation process.

This can be tricky. Developing this journalistic capability is the hardest, but most important, part of your journey. There are a number of options here. On one end of the spectrum, you could hire a full-time journalist. The good news for you is that many journalists are extraordinarily gifted and, unfortunately, their traditional professional opportunities are become scarcer every day. Newspapers and magazines are on life support. Exceptional journalists are struggling to find work. Find them and hire them.

On the other end of the spectrum, you could hire an intern. Go down to the university near your office with the best journalism program, find a great student, and have them come by your office for a half day every Friday morning to write. If you are extraordinarily budget conscious, you may even be able to pay them through course credit.

Of course, there are many options in between these two extremes. The journalism industry is very open to freelance lifestyles. You can find a freelancer to write for you. Alternatively, do you have an office administrator? Traditionally, these folks have exceptional written communication skills. Could you eliminate a mundane five-hour task in their week to free up time for valuable content production time?

When hiring this journalist, do not obsess about domain experience. This hire does not need to have deep knowledge of your product, your industry, or your buyer. It is helpful, but it is less important than great journalism skills. A great journalist can sit down with a PhD neuroscientist, pick her brain for an hour, and write a beautifully interesting piece of content. They do not need to be experts in the space.

Once you have found the journalist, the next step is to form a thought leadership committee. The thought leadership committee provides the journalist with a continual source of domain knowledge. Anyone at the company who understands your industry, your product value proposition, and your customer's needs should be considered for the thought leadership committee. Certainly your executive team should participate. If you sell a technical product, some engineers should be involved. If you have relationships with partners or external thought leaders, they can contribute as well. Your salespeople on the front lines are valuable resources here because they understand your buyers. They hear the questions buyers have at the beginning of their buying journey. Salespeople have well-rehearsed answers to those questions. They understand which answers resonate with the buyer. These questions and corresponding answers make for beautiful blog articles. In fact, check the “Sent Items” folders on your salespeople's email server. Salespeople often send the same canned responses to their prospects as they address questions that arise throughout the buying journey. These canned emails make for exceptional blog articles.

With both the journalist and thought leadership committee in place, the final step is to put the two functions together to produce content on a continual basis. I refer to this step as defining the content production process. Let's assume you have 10 people on your thought leadership committee. An example content production process would look like this. Every Tuesday at 9 a.m., one member of the thought leadership committee will sit down with the journalist for a one-hour interview. The interview should be on a niche subject. Don't choose your product as the subject. The interview should be about a trend in the industry, a question buyers have early in their buying journey, a phrase that likely resonates with an individual your business can help, and so forth. After this one-hour interview, that member of the thought leadership committee is done for 10 weeks, as the other members will cycle in.

An hour interview can generate a lot of content. From that one-hour interview, the journalist can write a three- to five-page ebook on the discussion topic. The journalist can write three or four short blog posts around niche subjects in the ebook. The journalist can generate dozens of social media messages for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook about the quotes, stats, and trends mentioned in each blog article. Although this content is created within a day or two, it can be scheduled for release to the public over an entire month. Each day of the month, one of the social media messages is published. It links to the corresponding blog article, driving interested readers to the blog. At the end of the blog article is a call to action to the reader that states, “Did you like this blog article on XYZ? Perhaps you will like the ebook we published on the same subject.” Many readers click the call to action and are brought to a landing page, where they find out that the ebook is free. They simply need to provide their name, email, phone number, and company URL, and they will have access to the ebook immediately.

This process can be repeated each week. If you're feeling enthusiastic, you can repeat it twice per week or even every day. The result is a stream of high-quality content, developed with minimal budget and minimal time from the executive team and other high-value employees. You have now extracted the brain power of the company and promoted it to your buyers on the digital page. As more and more content is published, more and more potential buyers follow your business on social media. More and more people link to your corporate website and blog. As we learned earlier in this chapter, this rise in social media following and inbound links drives exponential growth in the number of buyers finding you via Google searches. Thanks to the landing page and free ebook offer, a high percentage of these website visitors self-identify themselves to your business in exchange for the complimentary content. This is inbound marketing at its best. This is a formula for predictable, scalable demand generation.

Let's walk through a “before-and-after” example to understand how impactful this demand generation strategy can be. Assume you have 10,000 visitors per month to your website. Let's also assume you have one call to action on your website—“Contact Us.” As a result, the website converts only 0.5 percent of your visitors into leads, or 50 leads per month. This is a very common reality for a small or medium-sized business.

Now, let's assume you embrace the inbound marketing tactics for a few months. It is not uncommon for traffic to grow by multiples—let's assume three times. Now you are getting 30,000 visitors per month. It is also not uncommon for the visitor-to-lead conversion rate to increase from 0.5 percent to 3 percent with all of these useful ebook offers. At a 3 percent visitor-to-lead conversion rate and 30,000 visitors per month, you are now producing 900 leads per month, up from 50! That represents a “game-changing” impact to your business.

Complement Content Production with Social Media Participation

The content production process is powerful. However, its impact can be significantly amplified by complementing content production with frequent participation in the online discussions where your target buyers are already conversing. Your target buyers are having hundreds, sometimes thousands of conversations online every day. Many of these conversations are related to the value your business provides to these target buyers. Social media is like a live conference that is happening every second of every day. Set up your booth and get involved in the conversation.

Here are some examples of the nooks in which your target buyers may be conversing, and examples of how you can engage with them online.

Perhaps there are a handful of blogs that many of your target buyers read. You should read those blogs too. Add value to the conversation by leaving an intelligent comment. Sign the comment with your name and hyperlink your name back to your blog. If you leave the first comment on a hot article that eventually goes viral, that will be more beneficial than any online advertisement you can purchase. Furthermore, most great bloggers love getting comments on their blogs. They often respond to the comments. They mentally note who leaves insightful comments on their blogs. Don't be afraid to reach out to them via email once you have been active on their blog for some time. Form a tighter relationship with the blogger. Invite them to guest blog on your blog. Ask if you can submit a guest blog for their blog. They will probably be interested. Now your thought leadership will be promoted to a new audience of target customers. Even better, your thought leadership gets a big rubber stamp of approval because this blogger, whom the audience already trusts, has authorized and endorsed your content. How valuable will that be to you?

Another source you may try is Twitter. Find the people on Twitter who your target buyers follow. Follow these same Twitter users. Read their tweets. Retweet the posts you find interesting and relevant to your buyers. A lot of these authoritative Twitter users will probably follow you back. Don't be afraid to reach out to them via email and form a tighter relationship with them, just as you did with the bloggers. The next time you publish a piece of content, ask if they wouldn't mind promoting it on their Twitter stream. If you have already scratched their back by promoting their stuff a few times, and if your content is high-quality, almost all of them will return the favor. Now their 5,000 followers, the majority of whom are target customers for you, just received a big stamp of approval for your thought leadership (and your business) from a thought leader they trust. How valuable will that be to you?

Finally, find the LinkedIn groups in which your prospects are congregating. Read the questions they ask. Answer the questions that are most relevant to your company's value proposition. Don't worry about promoting your product. In fact, don't mention it. Don't even worry about promoting your content. Simply answer their questions with smart responses. Add value. Be helpful. Show off how knowledgeable you are in the space. People will click through your response to your LinkedIn profile. They will notice the company you work for. They will probably check it out. They will probably read your content and subscribe to it. How valuable will that be to you?

Social media participation is not a one-way stream to promote your content. That is an egotistical approach. That is too selfish. That is not networking. The best networkers at an event don't show up and just talk about themselves. They meet people. They ask questions. They add value. Use these same techniques online. As a rule of thumb, I like one-third of my social media messages to be about my company and two-thirds to be about other people.

Long-Tail Theory

There is an important concept that was created over a decade ago by Christopher Anderson in his book, The Long Tail. The long tail refers to the fact that, within a given population, a large percentage of overall data will be represented by the multitude of small data batches scattered farther down the curve. This concept is important for successful inbound marketing, especially as it relates to selecting content topics.

Figure 10.1 illustrates the long-tail concept.

Let's add some context to this chart. Let's assume the chart is illustrating various books sold in this year. In this case, the x-axis, labeled “Products,” would represent the titles of all the books that will be sold this year. The y-axis, labeled “Popularity,” represents the total sales for each book. The best seller of the year is listed first and all the other titles, listed in order of total sales, follow along the x-axis. At the extreme right of the x-axis are the many titles that will sell only a handful of copies this year. The first books listed have generated enormous revenues. The area under the curve represents the total revenue generated by all of the books produced this year.

By segmenting this revenue, we can illustrate the long-tail concept. The area under the “head” of the curve represents the revenue generated from the best sellers of the year. This is where brick-and-mortar book stores had to make their money. Because of the limitations on physical inventory in their stores, it only made sense for them to sell the absolute best-selling books. These businesses are limited to the revenue potential illustrated at the “head” of the curve.

As a reader, if I wanted to purchase a book written many years ago that is no longer a best seller, I certainly would not stroll down to my local bookstore. The book likely wouldn't be in stock. Where would I go? Amazon.com, of course. One way Amazon.com differentiated itself, especially in its early years, was by doing business in the “long-tail” area of the curve. In many industries, the area under the tail is actually greater than the area under the head. Most importantly, it is often less competitive. The Internet enables businesses to attract customers by using the “long-tail” portion of the curve. The “long-tail” concept can be applied to the movie rental business, with Netflix versus Blockbuster. It can be applied to video content, with YouTube versus cable TV. It can be applied to music, with Spotify versus Best Buy.

So how does long-tail theory apply to your business? As you embark on a content product process, focus on the “long tail,” not on the “head,” especially when selecting target topics. If you sell IT services, don't focus on phrases like “IT consultant” or “information technology.” These words sit at the head of the curve. Yes, there are millions of searches per month. However, it is extraordinarily competitive to rank for these terms. Furthermore, a small portion of the visitors are actually qualified buyers for your business. Instead, focus on “Sharepoint implementations” or “IT for pharmaceutical companies” or “hosted VOIP implementations.” There are not millions of searches for these terms every month. However, there are still hundreds of them, and the people searching for these terms are much more qualified for your business than those folks searching for the generic, far more competitive phrases. Each piece of content you produce targets a different slice of the long tail. Each piece of content attracts hundreds of highly qualified buyers to your business. The more you publish content along this strategy, the larger the portion of the long tail you can own. As we stated earlier, the long tail can often be more valuable than the head.

This chapter introduces the basics of inbound marketing to modernize your demand generation strategy. For a deeper dive into this concept, read Inbound Marketing, by the HubSpot co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah.