Don't Confuse Inbound Marketing Tools with the Methodology

We've recently moved over to HubSpot at work to handle our marketing automation and assist in our Inbound Marketing efforts.

At ShoreTel, we are big fans of Inbound Marketing and believe that being customer-centric is necessary for success in the modern economy.

I was reading a post about the latest report on the State of Inbound Marketing and one of the comments really stuck with me. It was from someone called "HT" who did not like what he was reading...

HT: Blah, blah, blah. Of course Hubspot is going to create a report singing the praises of "Inbound Marketing" and making claims that "traditional marketing" is dying. Do you think they would make a report claiming the opposite? It's self-serving. Branding, messaging, targeting, promotion, service and the product itself are the drivers. Let's not fool ourselves. Without those, inbound is irrelevant. "Inbound" is but a portion of the overall marketing strategy. It does not succeed on it's own. However, as a part of an overall plan, it has its place in the big-picture. I'll be honest, I am not a fan of landing pages that require me to give you my information before you even tell me what you are offering or why it would matter to me. I'm seeing way too much of that approach lately. And that approach seems to be emphasized by inbound marketers. What you will end up by following such a tactic is a list full of unqualified leads who simply filled out a form, but only because they wanted the info to review first. I would much rather have a list of people who had the information and THEN submitted their information to me, as they would be more likely a lead that would have a better chance of actually converting. In the time that we have transitioned our marketing efforts to a more "inbound" approach it has resulted mainly in unqualified leads who only wanted more info. The rate of sales success has been very low. I could go on and on. Marketing is all encompassing: print, digital, tv, radio, outdoor, sponsorship, events, public relations, social media, etc. You have to both drive customers to you (outbound) and draw them in through inbound means. If they don't know you exist, how will they know what they are looking for? It takes both inbound and outbound strategies to be truly successful in your marketing efforts.

I think more than anything what bothered me about the comment was that HT seemed upset that Inbound is growing in influence and that HubSpot is happy to promote itself and the positive trends towards Inbound.

By the time that I saw the HubSpot post, comments were closed. So, here what I would have liked to have written to HT:

My question is, why wouldn't they? They are a leader in a rapidly growing market.

Just because a positive report on the state of Inbound Marketing benefits HubSpot, that does not make the report untrue. The reality is that customers have changed and Inbound Marketing is the best way to reach them and build profitable relationships.

I'm open to whatever comes after Inbound, but right now it's the best methodology available and until something better comes along, it's where marketers should be focusing and investing their time, resources and energy.

Inbound Marketing is a movement, not a fad. 

Inbound Marketing is not a panacea nor will everyone who tries it be good at it. The same is true of traditional marketers. For every masterpiece such as "here's to the crazy ones" there are thousands of examples of schlock.

I agree with you that too many websites ask for visitor info before telling you about their company or what they do. But then again, that is not really Inbound Marketing because it is not a customer-centric approach. Just because they use some of the tools or  techniques of Inbound Marketing does not mean that they are practicing good Inbound Marketing.

Do not confuse the use of Inbound Marketing tools with actually practicing Inbound Marketing as a discipline.  It's very easy to buy and throw in a tool.  The true value of Inbound Marketing comes from following the process and methodology.  The tools are there to facilitate, enable, and make those processes more efficient. You, as the marketer, still need to decide:

• Who are your customers and what they are looking for?
• How to communicate the value that your company and products offer to your customers?
• What steps and characteristics you and your customer go through in the funnel?
• Which calls to action, offers and content are most effective?
• What are the hypotheses that need to be tested?
• What is the right amount of content to provide, when, where, and how to push the prospect deeper in the funnel?
• etc...

For your company HT, consider lead scoring or some other process for segmenting your leads so you are only spending time on those most likely to convert. Perhaps you are gating too much content on your website. Perhaps you do not nurture your leads to identify and separate the good ones from the bad.

I hope you find a way to Inbound success.

Was Morgan Freeman recommended to me because of my name?

So, yesterday I get a Google+ email with suggestions for people I should add to my circles.  I was a bit surprised to see Morgan Freeman listed first in the list.  I enjoy pretty much all of his movies and think he is a great actor, but I have the feeling that Google recommended him because we have the same last name.  Who knows what goes on in the secret sauce of the recomendation algorithm, but this one seems a bit off.  I have no idea who Brendan or Adriana are.

Perhaps Google could do something like Apple's Genius recommendations and at least give a hint as to why or how they think we are connected.

I wish Morgan Freeman were my uncle!

When living in Spain and telling people my last name, I always had to say (in Spanish) "you know, Freymann like Morgan Freymann." Sometimes I even was able to convince a few people that we were related and he was an uncle of mine (by marriage). I wish.

"I hope the pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope." - Red

@Google: How is this a good search result for business phone system?

UPDATE 01/24/13 - Cisco finally fixed their CMS. The formatting is still broken on the content but at least it is back on the page. For Google, it does not seem to matter either way because they rank #2 as if nothing ever happened.

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UPDATE 01/22/13 - The Google cache has been updated to show the blank page and it still ranks #2. Amazing. Talk about giving Cisco the benefit of the doubt.

Where's the beef?

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UPDATE 01/21/13 - Cisco still in position #2 and they still have an empty page! At least a week with absolutely no real content in the page, which is clearly broken. You'd think that even if Google doesn't notice the problem, Cisco would at least notice by now. Does anyone actually manage this part of their website?

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UPDATE 01/17/13 - Cisco has moved up to position #2 and they still have an empty page!  Both Google and Cisco are asleep at the switch on this one. It's been more than 3 days since their content has been MIA (I doubt I happened to find the page right when their CMS broke).
I wonder which will happen first:

• Google will recrawl the page and update its rankings correctly
• Cisco will realize that their CMS is serving up a bunch of donut pages and they'll fix it

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I am getting familiar with the telecom industry in search as part of my job.  Each industry has its own nuances, players, and idiosyncrasies.  One thing that is common is that from time to time you will find head-scratching results in the SERPs (search engine results pages).  Often it is because someone is having a bad day (site is down, CMS error, hosting provider makes a DNS mistake, etc....).  Other times, it is because Google just has not yet gotten around to updating their index for a particular term.  They may get to it eventually, but sometimes they are a bit slow to update the results even though the underlying content and/or competition has changed for a given topic. It is impossible for Google to stay on top of each result and each page for every term at every second of every day.  But then again, when you listen to Eric Schmidt, he thinks that the whole concept of showing a list of search results is a failure.

Today, I found a good example of someone having a bad day leading to a poor search result.  If you search for "business phone system" you will see Cisco listed with the #3 position in the organic results:

Nice position, there should be good content behind that link, right?

You can' always get what you want....

You would think that after clicking on that highlighted result you would be presented with some sort of wizard/set of questions to help me find the perfect phone system for my small business. You would think that wouldn't you? Well, let's see what we get instead:

This is thin content

Now, that is what I call a generous use of white space on a page layout.

My guess is that the CMS is broken or someone at Cisco has inserted some code (perhaps to trigger the chat window) which prevents the main content from displaying.

After navigating a few different pages, it looks like the problem may be pretty serious because I found multiple "empty" pages today on their site.  I'm curious though at what point does  Google take this into consideration into changing rankings/indexed status of such a page.

The last cached copy from Google is January 3rd, which at least did have real content in the page (not great, but at least something).  So we know that it worked correctly 11 days ago, but not sure when the page stopped working correctly.

Even when working correctly, the page content did not satisfy the promise made by the headline.  It listed off some features/functionality that users should consider but it did nothing to actually educate visitors on what those features mean, not the tradeoffs or factors are to consider with regard to the list of features. It also makes sure to mention that you should talk to a trusted adviser (translation - Cisco reseller).  Why can't Cisco just clearly educate the visitor right on this page?  Furthermore, it lists the next step as a link to learn more about Cisco's solutions, but when you get to that page it is just a list of their products without any guidance to what you should be looking to learn or how it fits together.  Obviously, I am biased, but I think the content we provide is better. You be the judge.

We all have bad days

Sometimes our sites don't behave as they are supposed to. Let's just hope that if these problems persist, Google will get around to taking that into consideration in the rankings, even if the site is famous.  Otherwise, that is an unfair advantage for "big" sites.  Google should not protect the 1% sites any better than the 99% when mistakes are made.

You can get the Gringo out of Spain, but...

I have been totally radio silent on this blog for a long time.  A lot has happened since I last wrote about the Barça game:

• We've left Spain and moved to the happiest place in America.  Even Oprah agrees.
• I've started working for ShoreTel Sky, a cloud based business VoIP service in their Marketing department.  First time working from home.  Required some adjustment, but so far going well.
• Getting the boys settled and adapted to new schools, new house, and new language (well, at least new for them to speak outside of the house)
• Surfing much more....the Pacific as a few more waves than the Mediterranean sea.
• No more weekly basketball games. Switched over to futbol (soccer) instead.
• Trying to pickup my tennis game when I can.

Overall, it has been a very good transition. We miss our family and friends back in España but we´re now with other family here and starting to make some new friends (as well as see some great old ones too).

Now that I have rediscovered the blog, I hope to get back to writing some more.  

Need to find some time to keep improving GA Evolution. I have received some great feedback on good features.  In progress, but no ETA on the next rev. Hope in the next few weeks to get the top items completed.

2013 is looking great so far and excited to see where it leads.

A Barça Game Full of Firsts & Lasts

I had always said to Dante that he'd go to see a football match once he was 4 years old. We were lucky enough to get a free ticket to last week's Barça match. As luck would have it, the game would be a series of "firsts" and "lasts" for us and the team:

• Last time Guardiola would coach in el Campo Nou
• Last home game of the season
• Last time I can probably take Diego to see a game and have him get in for free
• First game ever for Dante
• First game ever for all three of us together
• First time for someone to break the single season scoring record in all competitions (Messi) since the 1920s
• First time for someone (Messi) get to 50 league goals in a single season

90 minutes can be long for young kids, even if it is watching great football.  Nevertheless, being there was special and something that I'll never forget. Thank you Eva and Xavi for getting the ticket for us.

Just me and the boys with great seats...

Distilled bookmarklet modified to support GA Custom URLs

Tom Critchlow from Distilled released a bookmarklet this week that lets you instantly access the traffic stats in GA for whatever page on which you are navigating (assuming you have permission in GA of course).  It works perfectly on any site with GA so long as it does not use custom URL in the _trackPageview command (well over 90% of sites).

However, for sites like ours, we were out of luck because we always use custom URLs to give us finer tuned reporting and allows us to leave URLs optimized (or at least semi-optimized with what our CMS will allow) while having detailed and optimized data for reporting and analysis.

I have modified the script to work with sites that use custom URLs for tracking in GA as well as for standard implementations.

javascript:location.href="https://www.google.com/analytics/web/#report/content-pages/INSERT-CODE-HERE/%3F_r.drilldown%3Danalytics.pagePath"+encodeURIComponent(":"+ (typeof _gat.N[0].F == "undefined" ? location.pathname : _gat.N[0].F))+"%26explorer-table.secSegmentId%3Danalytics.source/";

The key change is to substitute location.pathname from the original script and replace it with a block that checks for any custom URLs stored in GA for that page

(typeof _gat.N[0].F == "undefined" ? location.pathname : _gat.N[0].F)

The only caveat is that you are still out of luck if your use inbound filters to transform your URLs inside GA. Unfortunately, there is no easy solution other then creating a regex yourself to apply the same transformation to the URL.

Instructions for making this work on your site:
1) Go to Tom's post
2) Enter your code from GA as he mentions it in his post
3) Drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar
4) Right click the bookmarklet and edit the script by changing:
location.pathname
to
(typeof _gat.N[0].F == "undefined" ? location.pathname : _gat.N[0].F)

Change the part that says location.pathname to (typeof _gat.N[0].F == "undefined" ? location.pathname : _gat.N[0].F)

5) Click OK and you are good to go

GA is a bit confused this morning...

GA this morning forgot its cup of coffee

I am really enjoying the new GA v5, especially as they start porting some of the remaining functionality that has been missing these last months such as PDF and email support.  They even have improved the contrast in the latest iteration so I don't feel compelled to try to make GA higher contrast

One area, however, that I prefer from before was the main graph area.  It used to show the comparison information from previous periods as well as percentage differences. I suppose to save CPU they decided to remove that info and only post the standard aggregate data. The scaling also really needs some improvement because they play with the labels and scale with every change of a report.

Some things though you can just chalk up to being "beta".  This morning GA seems a bit confused on how to display its labels for time.  Look at the screenshot below. Hours are days and days are hours....feels a bit philosophical.

Not quite up to swiss watchmaker standards...

Hope they fix this later today.

PLUS: GA Evolution is Evolving

Also, I just wanted to give a quick heads up that I am completely rewriting Google Analytics Evolution.  The new version will be a responsive design in HTML5, based on Bootstrap, jQuery (of course), and the alpha (please don't break) version of the Google API Javascript Client Library.  I have all of the data pieces working and now I am just finishing the presentation of the returned data.

After that I will put Flot back into the mix and I'll relaunch.  This new verison will also include an option to sum/aggregate data from separate queries on the page.  Nothing very sophisticated and you'll need to be careful about aggregating averages, but for people who manage multiple sites but do not have "global" profiles setup in GA this can be a time saver.

Hope to have this released in the next week or two.