Book Intro: The Brief & Hidden History Of Inbound Marketing

This is an edited part of the AVR's book 'One To Three', available on Amazon.
-
What is Inbound Marketing? If you can answer this question in your sleep, then it is best to skip the intro. As initially, I want to say what Inbound isn’t. Inbound isn’t about paid ads. Inbound isn’t comprised of cold calling, or by featuring yourself on Forbes. Inbound is when leads come to you without you buying ads, calling people on the phone, cold emailing, or by paying sponsored content. You do Inbound by optimizing traffic, improving conversion rates, automating leads’ nurturing, etc.
 
The One to Three Initiative, or ‘123’, serves to focus your efforts to turn 'one lead into three' or increase the flow of leads in general. And we know how expensive leads can get so this would save 2/3 of the marketing budget in the best-case scenario. Wouldn’t you be a hero if you manage to pull something similar off and perhaps even get a bigger check? Now, let’s touch upon the history of ‘Inbound Marketing’. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a marketing business that provides services of managing client relationships, sending them messages, and enabling tracking their journey throughout your business. They needed a way to explain what they do. So, they started using ‘inbound marketing’ to explain it simply & easily. This is how the ‘Inbound marketing’ started to spread from a PR/marketing ploy of a company to an industry trendsetter. And it happened just recently, so welcome to history. It started with a digital PR strategy and it ended with the digital PR strategy.  Now, Inbound is mostly about earned, unpaid digital PR that spreads with word of mouth. Initially, Inbound was limited to client relationship management (CRM), user experience (UX), and user interface (UI) optimization.  This included search engine optimization (SEO), social media posting, and some blogging usually on your website. Later this grew to be considered only the starting point to what that killer one-liner “Inbound’ evolved to mean.  Today, inbound marketing is mostly about the seamless integration of everything above with the everything below into stellar initiatives that provide measurable results:

• Earned digital PR and influencers/blogs
• Automation and reducing costs
• Optimizing clients’ journeys and conversions
• Optimizing client’s funnels and closing rates
 
It seems that other platforms have overtaken HubSpot by a large margin in revenues and market share. Think of Salesforce, OracleCRM, SugarCRM, and Zoho One as salient examples.  However, we must give kudos to their PR and educational efforts. 

Thank you, HubSpot!​
 
Like the political system is a bucket placed upside down on a stream of water, never capturing the whole of it, any categorization misses fine details and the whole realm of marketing. However, we would be using the Inbound/Outbound marketing categorization onward for having some structure and clarity for people thinking in systems and systematically.
-
Do you want your company to set a trend in an entire industry like HubSpot did? Then do inquire about iSEE's digital PR services.

Appraise our services at iSEE Marketing

Get the whole book on Amazon