How Inbound Marketing Is Rapidly Changing

0:00Alright, so we're going to talk about how inbound marketing is rapidly changing. So I'm going to start this one off because this one was my idea. And I read something on LinkedIn from a friend. His name is Peter Caputa. He's the CEO of Databox. So we've talked a couple of times in the past, and he's got a lot of data on how companies are doing. And his whole shtick on this post is that inbound marketing isn't working as it used to. And at a high level, here's what's happening. So search traffic is going down. It's very competitive. Website engagement metrics are awful. People aren't reading long form content as much anymore.

0:35And nurturing sequences just aren't doing that well anymore. And so then he shows a picture. There's this graph where it shows that inbound traffic and inbound leads are continuing to go down. So if you are like Neil and I, we actually take a pretty SEO heavy approach, even though we do LinkedIn, even though we do podcasts, even though we speak and I do events and things like that. we still are, there's a lot of traffic that we have that, or a lot of the lead flow might come from traditional SEO as an example, but that's fading. And so what we wanted to talk about in this podcast is how inbound marketing is changing, but also what you can do to counteract that and what channels are worthy of pursuing and how you might want to think differently instead of trying to be the teacher every time, how it might be a little different.

1:20So in this case, for marketing school, Neil and I are actually teaching most of the time. Sometimes we might curate. So sometimes we might react to things or we might react to news or we might have a guest appear on the show, which is really rare. Or we might, for example, in the newsletter I have, we will curate content. And so there's a difference between teaching versus curating. And we'll talk about that a little more. But Neil, you have any thoughts on this? Yeah. So yes, SEO is becoming harder. Social media is becoming harder. Some of the channels are declining. Emails aren't as effective as they were before.

1:53That happens with all marketing channels, including television advertising, including, you know, running pay-per-click ads. It doesn't matter what it is. The more competitive something gets, the harder it's going to become to produce the same ROI. That's just normal. But if companies spend more resources on things like conversion optimization, which is not a sexy topic. And every time we talk about it, I blog about it. I seen very few people want to read about it. But some of those things solve a lot of the problems. And what we look at is not if inbound is less effective than before, because we're still seeing a lot of companies generate a massive ROI.

2:31If they weren't, we wouldn't be in business. I look at marketing as a little bit different, whether it's inbound or outbound. It's really simple for me. You spend a dollar, whether dollars in ad money or in time, it doesn't matter, but you spend a dollar, can you make more? And as long as you can make more than what you're spending, spend as much as you can, as long as it's profitable. And for me, it really is that black and white. The part that's really changing though, is one companies are leveraging multi-channel when they need to be leveraging omni-channel. We're seeing refunds go down when you leverage omni-channel and create congruent experiences.

3:12Nike, Disney, they all do a great job of this. A lot of brands do not, but check them out if you want to end up seeing. Timberland uses near-field technology to make the in-store experiences amazing. You should check them out as well. But that's the first big change that we're seeing. The second big change that we're seeing is people are doing the same thing that everyone else is doing, and it's not causing a great ROI, but the companies who are getting creative, whether it's not doing influencer marketing like everyone else, but doing a partnership with an influencer like Ryan Reynolds and giving them equity in the business, making them part of the founding team and having them really push the business and look what happened with Mint or Mountain.

3:53Those are all great examples of getting creative and doing really well in super competitive markets. So those are the two big changes that we're seeing. If I had to list out a third one, companies are using AI to become way more efficient, which is allowing them to squeeze out more margins, which is allowing them to get a much better ROI from their inbound marketing as well. Yep. So I'll, I'll make mine a little more simple in terms of how people are approaching inbound marketing now. And this, this is working off the post. So Neil just mentioned the omni channel approach. And so instead of just relying on an SEO, you can look at where organic reach is strong right now.

4:33So organic reach is strong on LinkedIn. Organic reach is pretty good on Twitter and organic reach is pretty good on shorts. So short form content. And then you have to think about, okay, of these channels that have good organic reach, where's my audience actually hanging out? Where are my ideal client profiles actually hanging out? And then you can create content there. What ends up building good rapport? Newsletters build good rapport. And your newsletter doesn't even have to be that amazing. A lot of newsletters out there are subpar. They just do good with marketing and they sell ads against it.

5:00You can sell your services or your products against it. The reason I like doing events is because they build affinity and they build goodwill. And I just like learning. And so it's my excuse to put a bunch of people together and do these events, even though there are a lot of work. And so webinars, conferences, meetups, that type of stuff. So it is very omni-channel. You just got to decide, A, what are you comfortable with, where your audience is hanging out. And don't try to do everything under the sun. I'm just saying that inbound marketing in its old form, maybe five to 10 years ago, how it used to be understood, it's rapidly changing.

5:30And a definition can't just be content marketing SEO anymore. It has to evolve a little more. And then eventually you want to get to the level where you're doing mostly branding. And then you can talk about the whole, you know, trading your brand for equity, that type of stuff. If you're interested in doing those types of deals for the longterm. Anything else, Neil? Nope. That's it. All right. That is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. And we will see you later.