HubSpot is gearing up for their annual show, conference, party, idol worshipping ceremony.  Something like 11 million marketers (ok, 15,000) will descend on the now
thoroughly transformed Seaport District of Boston.  The intense amount of positivity that is implied, let alone the cool factor, is enough to keep me home.  Yet I will trudge on and, in spite of the onslaught of celebrity speakers who cannot help me, do my best to extract the latest and greatest in getting Inbound Marketing right.

Why?  Because it is really hard to do well; but I need to do it well.

I intend to learn 4 things and teach 1 at Inbound 2016.

1.  SEO:  Is this science or art?
2.  Is Content Marketing about to jump the shark?
3. Can someone just tell me how best to run a BDR shop
4. Attribution done right; without buying even more tools

My one to teach – if you are an e-commerce company; getting inbound marketing right is 40% of the battle, having a good product is 50% and having a great checkout/payments experience is the 10% most miss.  To learn a bit about that – check out my company’s post:  https://home.bluesnap.com/snap-center/blog/abandoned-cart-email/

But – back to what I hope to learn.  I recognize that the answers to each of these start with the basic questions of Segmentation and Value Prop… but let’s just brush that aside for the sake of this cry for help.

SEO:  Go big or go little?

I am not gonna lie – I miss the heady days of link building.  Got an SEO problem and $10k?  Then you don’t have a problem.  Now, the difficulty level of moving up for the keywords that rank is hard work.  I admit that Google works better than it ever has in serving up good answers to searches – but in a competitive market, it is tough to move the needle.

And herein lies the question.  Do you take a head-on, all hands-on-deck march toward the biggest search keywords in your space, regardless of difficulty?  Or do you nibble around the edges with long-tail keywords or focused longer search terms?  This questions drives all the way into the content we are producing, site architecture, blog strategy and it is one that I struggle to answer.  Hoping to find some ideas on parade.

Content Marketing:  Fonzi on Waterskis?

eBooks, Webinars, Infographics.  This stuff is hard to make – but, I admit, I love it all.  It raises the image of the company, gives you multiples ways to tell your story to reach different learning styles and generally impresses the internal team – sales feels like Marketing must be doing something when a cool new ebook comes out…

All that said, identifying that right combination of content that attracts the right buyers, moves them down the funnel and helps your sales team is again really hard.  And the volume of publishing from the vendor community is outdoing Fox, NBC and CBS by a country mile.  It makes me wonder if we are publishing ourselves out of a job.  If we all make the best eBook on new Mobile Marketing Techniques…do any of us win?   I want to hear some stories about Content that is leading to real leads – not just downloads.

BDR:  A laptop, a phone and a winning attitude.  And a set of steak knives.

Hit the phones!  No, wait, its all about email!  LinkedIn Premium, thats the ticket!  Wait for them to come to you; inbound leads are the only ones that matter!

This slow roar is all from inside my head.  I know I need BDRs to pounce on Inbound leads as they come in – how do I design the right mix of efforts to compliment that.  Should they be carefully crafting outreach to select targets or should they be turning the spigot loose and touching the rails on spam?  I am hoping to hear stories of B2B lead programs that have found the happy balance – feeding off Inbound, but maintaining a healthy outbound program to go with it.

Attribution:  Traffic is up, leads are up, revenues up – anyone know why?

Picking the right model that explains how efforts are working or not has been an elusive task.  I feel like all the data is there; and yet, so many factors muddy the waters.  To run the business right I need only answer a few questions:

1.  ARe we growing our revenues?  Are we likely to continue to?
2. Do we know where the customers are coming from that drive those revenues?
3. How much does it cost (for each source)?

At a top level, I can get to these measurements.  The devil pops up after the first double click.  Ok – was it the eBook that drove the traffic?  was it Adwords?  was it referrals?  All this data sits in Hubspot (or Salesforce) – yet getting succinct answers to these questions remains a challenge.  I am hoping to hear a few stories about the B2B marketers who have got this licked.

That is my wish list.  If you are attending Inbound 2016 and have ideas on where / how I can learn more about these topics, please drop me a line.  If you are hoping to find the answers, I will post what I find (if anything…) after the show.

Worst comes to worst… see you at the “Cheers with Peers” Party