Think
about getting a marketing message out to a handful of business contacts. The
most efficient way to reach these individuals may be to pick up the phone and
call. But I don’t like the telephone and I ignore voice mails. In fact, I
delete most without listening to them. My attorney allows his voice mail to “fill
up.” He told me, “I don’t have to answer voice mails because no one can leave
them.”
You can
contact a small number of business associates in person. Golf and other
real-life social events are popular for this reason. You can fax a message, but
we learned in our research that the fax machine is loved by lawyers and not too
many others. In one organization we visited, the fax machine was used as a
makeshift coffee dolly. Financial services firms rely on messenger services to
move documents with a medallion seal from place to place.
The
shift is from outbound message methods to inbound message methods. “Outbound”
means that a business would push a message to one or more recipients. The idea
was to make a contact. The marketing method was the equivalent of picking up a
rifle or shotgun, loading up the payload, and aiming the weapon in the general
direction of the target. In today’s business world, the approach is easy to
understand and has legions of true believers. The problem is that the outbound
methods don’t work too well for most organizations. Have you bought legal
services from a telemarketer or a cable TV advertisement? Did you hire your new
accounting manager because you received a fax from a job seeker? No. The
traditional methods are ill-suited to the way organizations operate today.
These are outbound marketing methods and rely upon push.
Here’s
a mental exercise: Snip a 12-inch piece of string and place it on a flat
surface. Now try to push the string. What happens? The string is hard to push.
That’s the outbound marketing method. You can move the string, but it is
inefficient.
Inbound
marketing means that prospects, customers, friends and those with an interest
in what you do, find you. Visualize the grade-school science lesson with a
magnet and paper clips. The magnet gets close and the paper clips jump to the
magnet. Some paper clips stick to other paper clips. That’s how inbound
marketing works. Like the “magic” of magnetic attraction, interested people
jump to the “information magnet.”
How can
this method of inbound marketing be applied to your business? Our research,
conducted for a $1.5 billion information company, revealed four actions. Like
any marketing activity, the actions are a mix of the easy, fun, tedious and
difficult.