Josh Rich, Create the Movement

Brad Post, Create the Movement

Josh Rich, Create the Movement: Good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us for Create the Movement podcast. I’m Josh Rich. With me is Brad Post.

Brad Post, Create the Movement: How’s it going Josh?

J: Doing great Brad. How are you?

B: I’m doing well.

J: Excellent.

B: So, today we are to be speaking about inbound marketing. Is that right?

J: Correct.

B: Okay.

J: Inbound marketing. So, for starters, to define the term inbound marketing, seems a lot of people probably don’t know what that is. It sounds kind of strange. The biggest difference between inbound marketing and traditional marketing is that traditional marketing is what you’d see on TV ads or magazine ads. The advertiser interrupting the viewer’s life to promote their product or service.

B: Kind of shoving it in people’s faces?

J: Right. Exactly.

B: Whether you want to see it or not.

J: It sounds bad, but that’s what it is. They are shouting a message out and waiting for the person to respond.

B: Okay.

J: Inbound marketing is a different approach to that. It waits for the viewer to come to it.

B: Okay.

J: It’s not interruptive. This is stuff like blogs, or YouTube videos, or anything that the consumer would seek out for their own benefit, but it’s actually marketing material.

B: Would actually click, or press “PLAY”, or read.

J: Exactly. Anything that they would look at, read, watch, share would be considered inbound marketing.

B: Okay.

J: Email campaigns are kind of a hybrid of inbound and traditional.

B: Okay.              

J: The advantage is that is the consumer is already looking for information on whatever topic or product or service. So, they’re coming to you as somewhat of a warm lead.

B: Right.

J: As opposed to just throwing it in their face and hoping something sticks – as traditional marketing does. That’s a pretty big advantage, that they’re actually seeking it out, and not just, kind of unexpectedly getting hit in the face with it. So, that’s why there’s been a pretty big shift, as of recent, toward inbound marketing. It seems to be a little more effective if you can do it. It’s a little harder to do. It’s harder to create content. It’s harder to find the topics that people are looking for. But, it is pretty good. So, that’s kind of this fundamental shift. Where we saw the Mad Men-days of advertising, that was very much like telling the consumer what they wanted. Versus now, when we’re trying to educate them, as opposed to selling to them.

B: Right. Because people are searching differently than they have in the past.

J: Exactly.

B: They’re asking Google questions. They’re asking Siri questions.

J: Exactly. That’s kind of an overview of what inbound marketing is, and why we’re switching to that. As we look at that, there’s two major aspects we want to look at when we’re considering a strategy for inbound marketing.

First, is knowing your consumer. And so, whatever industry you’re in, whatever you’re selling, or service you’re offering, you need to know why your consumer would be interested in your company. There’s a couple of things you can do for that. First, if have a good consumer base already, a great thing to do is to come up with a survey. And figure out what they do, how they tick, why they chose you over a different service. So, that way you can capitalize on that. You need to know different behavior patterns, how they search for things in Google. Or, what they search for. What social media they’re on. That’s going to be a big part of that. That’s the foundation. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, then you don’t know how to talk.

The second thing, that you want to consider is your content. Content is absolutely essential to inbound marketing. In fact, content marketing and inbound marketing are used synonymously, which they shouldn’t be. But somewhat the same thing. Content can be anything. As we said earlier, it could be a blog; it could be...