A Practical Guide to Inbound Marketing

Boston-based startup HubSpot, founded in 2006 by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, gave a name to something a lot of marketers were already sensing: people are getting better at ignoring ads and better at finding answers themselves through search. “Inbound marketing” is their term for earning attention through useful content instead of buying or interrupting for it. Here are seven concrete tactics that make it work in practice.

1. Start a business blog and keep it running

A blog gives you somewhere to publish the answers your customers are already searching for, whether that’s a how-to guide, an industry explainer or an honest comparison of options. The businesses seeing traction aren’t publishing once and quitting; they’re posting on a schedule they can sustain, because a stale blog signals neglect as loudly as a good one signals expertise.

2. Write pages around the terms customers search

Search engines reward pages that clearly answer a specific query. Before writing, think about the phrase a prospective customer would type, and build a page that answers it directly rather than one built around your own internal product language. A page written for how customers search will get found; a page written for how your company talks about itself usually won’t.

3. Offer something free and useful

A free tool, template, checklist or guide gives people a reason to give you their email address, which is the bridge between an anonymous visitor and someone you can follow up with. It has to be worth the trade; a thin giveaway attached to an aggressive pitch trains people to avoid your offers next time.

4. Get mentioned on other people’s sites

A link from a relevant site sends both direct visitors and a signal to search engines that your page is worth ranking. Guest posts, useful data other sites want to cite and simple relationship-building with people in your industry all earn this kind of mention over time. It’s slower than buying an ad, but it keeps working long after a single post is published.

5. Build an email sequence, not just a newsletter

Once someone gives you their email, most businesses send one generic newsletter to everyone. A better approach is a short sequence of a few emails, spaced out and increasingly specific to what a new contact signed up for, that walks them from curious to ready to buy. Automated email software has made this achievable for small teams, not just large ones.

6. Make sharing easy on the sites people already use

Word of mouth now happens partly on public sites like Digg and the fast-growing Twitter, alongside forums and email forwards. Add simple share options to your best content and don’t be shy about linking to it from your own social accounts; a useful piece that’s easy to pass along reaches people your own list never would.

7. Track what’s working

Google Analytics, free since 2005, makes it possible for any business to see which pages bring visitors, how those visitors move through the site and which ones convert. Check the numbers regularly and put more effort behind what’s working rather than what feels like it should be working. Inbound rewards the patient, but only if you’re measuring the right things along the way.

The pattern underneath all seven

Every one of these tactics runs on the same principle: be useful first and let that usefulness do the work that an interruptive ad used to do. It’s slower to start than buying attention outright, and it asks for real content rather than a clever slogan. In exchange, it keeps working for months after you’ve stopped actively promoting it, which is more than most outbound spending can claim.