Has your company embraced inbound and content marketing as the new SEO? Here are some insights from HubSpot's Inbound2012 conference that may help along with recent data from ThomasNet.com, the world's leading industrial supplier discovery and sourcing site.

1. How your small to medium-sized business can
thrive in a socially connected world.
Sarah Sturtevant
President, Integrated Website Solutions Inc.

2. Why B2B companies need a new customer acquisition
strategy
What is Inbound Marketing?
Content Marketing vs. Traditional SEO
Keys to success: Listen, Problem-solve, Engage, Be
Authentic
Listening Drives Customer Retention & Loyalty
Conversion: Social CRM and closed loop marketing

4. “There has been a massive transformation in the way we
live, shop, work and learn. It’s a tectonic shift.”
-Brian Halligan, HubSpot Co-Founder & CEO
-Old sales/marketing and media inputs of our parents’ generation: direct
mail, television, newspapers, magazines, telephones
-New sales/marketing and media inputs into our generation are radically
different: websites, mobile phones, tablets, webinars, blogs, podcasts
AND the pace of these technological inputs is ACCELERATING

5. “We’ve all getting very good at blocking out the traditional
marketing playbook.”
-Brian Halligan
Voice Mail – Filters telemarketing and cold calls
Spam Filters – Block email blasts
Unsolicited Direct Mail – Gets thrown out!
TV Commercials – PVR, TiVO technology allows us to skip ads

6.  Google Panda Update (February 2011) rewards websites that offer
valuable content and penalizes sites that use content farms, spammy linking or
lack usability (i.e. poor user experience).
 Google + social media platform launched (June 2011) which, along with
“Search Plus Your World” (January 2012) allows Google to mine what
content goes viral and personalize search results for those logged into Google
accounts.
 Google Caffeine or “Freshness” Update (November 2011) rewards sites that
publish fresh, valuable content frequently. Content that is shared has proven
value or “social proof”.
 Google’s Penguin Update (April 2012) penalizes sites that use “black hat”
SEO techniques (e.g. keyword stuffing, cloaking, deliberate duplicate content.)

7.  “Rather than doing outbound marketing to the masses of
people who are trying to block you out, I advocate doing
inbound marketing where you help yourself get found by
people already learning about and shopping in your
industry.
“We need to stop interrupting what people are
interested in and BE what people are interested
in.”
– Brian Halligan, HubSpot, CEO

8. Marketers need to create remarkable
content that answers customers’
questions or solves THEIR problems
rather than only talking about our
products.

10.  Companies need to speak “human”,
make their online content personal,
ENGAGING and SHARE-WORTHY!

11. General Electric Pinterest Campaign “Hey Girl, Thomas Edison Has a Crush on You”
“Inbound Marketing is the entire collection of
activities you’d use to get customers. Everything
from content to pull people in, and context to pull
people through.”
- Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot Co-Founder

13. Traditional SEO - On and off page optimization, link building and
buying, competitor audits, keyword-driven content building, pay-per-
click campaigns
Inbound Marketing – along with technical SEO efforts, develop
unique, relevant content that solves people’s problems (i.e. is
valuable) and distribute it frequently across multiple channels (i.e.
blogs, website, social media, email, videos) to earn more organic links
on Google.

14. Credit: Chad Pollit, Kuno Creative, 2011

17. Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOMOZ

18.  Inbound marketing leads cost 61% less than traditional,
outbound generated leads

20.  1) Reach relevant people
 2) Learn about your market
 3) Improve your search rankings
Dharmesh Shah, Hubspot Co-Founder and CTO

22. “Few companies operate effectively in the
present. Typical companies only plan business far
into the future.”
-David Meerman Scott,
Author of #1 bestseller,
The New Rules of Marketing & PR
Mobile allows us to search online for “What’s Happening Now!”

24. Real time content

25. If you are a small to medium-sized business, unless you sell pills,
poker or porn, do not hire an SEO expert. Hire a content producer.
Unless you have a highly competitive search environment, you are
better off creating lots of good content.
-
Dan Zarrella, HubSpot
Author, Social Media Scientist
“Science of” webinars attract over 30,000

26.  Listento your customers
 Engage
 Problem-solve
 Be Authentic

28. “Content is King, but CONTEXT is god!”
- Gary Vaynerchuk, NYT Best-selling author of “Crush It”
You have to “care immensely” about your customers and align your content with a customer’s
lifecycle stage and their interest graph - “Gary Vee”
Gary, a 36 year old New York Times and Wall Street Journal Best-Selling author who is also a self-trained wine and social
media expert. From a young age, it was clear that Gary was a businessman. At 8-years-old he was operating seven
lemonade stands in his neighborhood and by 10 he had moved onto selling baseball cards at local malls. In high school
while working at his family owned liquor store, Gary started reading The Wine Spectator and wine books, and realized
collecting wine offered an allure similar to his previous hobby of collecting baseball cards. With a wealth of knowledge and
an entrepreneurial spirit, Gary spent every weekend of his college years at his parents’ wine store. Recognizing the
importance of e-commerce in 1997, Gary launched Winelibrary.com and helped grow his family business significantly from
$3 million to $45 million by 2005.

29. “Retention is the game.
The game is how many people you KEEP.”
Social media is about authentic human communication. It takes time to
build relationships, but social technologies turn our world back into a
village where our reputations matter.
We can show our customers we care. If your brand does not care, it will
die.
The biggest payback for engaging in social media is
customer retention .
- Gary “Vee” Vaynerchuk

30.  Complex B2B sales involve 5-7 prospective
customer contacts throughout the buying cycle
 50% of B2B buyers require 6 or more touches to
BECOME a qualified sales lead
 It takes 3-6 months to nurture a lead to qualified
lead status
- Forresters Research

31.  Lead intelligence timelines, social media engagement tracking, lead
scoring, customizable landing pages, segmentation & forms,
personalized email marketing, custom fields, smart CTA’s, A/B
testing, smart lists, lead ROI tracking, fully integrated analytics –
state of the art marketing automation

32. Inbound marketers must help buyers move
through THEIR buying process and not try
to accelerate them through
OUR selling process.
@Forrester

33. For more information:
Sarah Sturtevant,
President
Integrated Website Solutions Inc.
Representing,
www.ThomasNet.com
Follow Me on:
Twitter: @sarahsturtevant
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/industryonline
Facebook:www.facebook.com/IntegratedWebsiteSolutions