Product

Your product is still important, but it’s secondary to consumers’ expressed needs. In other words, your products only matter if they’re fulfilling customer needs. Marketing by pushing your product doesn’t work anymore. In fact, it’s often seen as offensive. From the standpoint of inbound marketing, the best approach is actually to build new products and services based on customer needs rather than products pushed promotionally. In this new scenario, products are purpose-built to satisfy needs.

Consider Uber, the fantastically successful driver service. Uber is quickly outmaneuvering the standard taxi business by offering a formerly commoditized product — transportation — in a new, meaningful way. Both Uber and taxi services offer rides from point A to point B. The difference is when you use a service like Uber, you know you’ll be riding in a nicer unmarked car with a preapproved driver. By accessing Uber’s mobile app (see Figure 8-1), you know approximately how long you’ll have to wait before your ride arrives, the approximate time it will take for your ride, and a how much the ride will cost (within a certain range). Plus, because your credit card is on file with Uber from your initial sign-up, you don’t have to keep cash handy. Your credit card is automatically billed at the end of your ride, including the prefigured tip. To top it off, you may save time by choosing to have your receipt auto-emailed. Overall, the Uber ride experience is better than hailing a taxi.

Uber isn’t necessarily cheaper than taking a taxi, but it’s a more predictable experience. In my experience with Uber, I haven’t worried about riding in a vehicle with bad brakes and no shocks. There’s no fumbling around to pay at the end of the ride and no surprises from a driver demanding cash even though there are credit card emblems on the vehicle. That’s not to say that all taxi drivers are bad; it’s just that the taxi experience is unpredictable and inconsistent. Uber’s product is better because it was built on needs that have been long unmet by an archaic business model. And the free bottled water is a nice touch, too.

Place

In the original 4 P’s, place referred to either your product-distribution method or to your physical, brick-and-mortar stores. Product distribution is as important today as it was then — maybe even more important — but a brick-and-mortar store is a product-focused concept which, in most cases, is based on physical product interaction. Visiting the place of a store’s physical location requires effort. People no longer need to drive to the mall to make purchases between some predetermined store hours that may or may not be convenient for you. You can shop online when and where you want, at your convenience or whim, on your desktop or your mobile device. Internet access has eliminated the shopping constraints of the past. (This is why travel agents have become a rare species. You can shop Travelocity, Expedia, Hotels.com, AMEX, Priceline, and two airlines all at one time.)

So if your understanding of place doesn’t evolve, you’re not in the game. In the 4 P’s, place now refers to your customer’s location on the purchase path and how you should greet them appropriately based on that location. If your website doesn’t excel at creating the right “place” for your customers … or if you’re not serving up meaningful, relevant, contextual content that also creates engagement opportunities … well, you’re no place at all as an inbound marketer. Your visitor just bounced!

Price

Price is still relevant in connecting your product with people; it will probably always be a factor. But price isn’t the sole determining factor in a product-purchase decision, nor is it necessarily even the primary consideration.

Manufacturing companies often allow average unit price to determine market opportunity and to design their products and features rather than innovating based on consumer’s needs. This is a bad idea. Consider the example of Nest, the thermostat company. Nest was co-founded by former Apple engineers Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers in 2010, at a time when basic programmable thermostats sold for $25–$80. In 2011, they introduced their first “learning thermostat,” based on consumer research identifying a need for a simple, less confusing programmable thermostat.

The Nest thermostat is a simple, sleekly-designed circular dial with a large digital readout (see Figure 8-2). You turn it up, you turn it down. Oh, did I mention it’s Wi-Fi enabled? Nest begins to learn your habits and starts automatically adjusting based on your settings. Simple. Upon product launch, Nest retailed for the premium price of $249, and you could only purchase it online. So instead of relying on product engineers to design more confusing programmable buttons, Nest streamlined the product based on consumers’ stated needs and, in the process, redefined that marketplace opportunity, disrupting the industry. Price is, indeed, especially important when conveying value relative to satisfying consumer needs and not merely responding to alternative competitive products. In this case, Nest used premium pricing to connote value rather than a typical discounting strategy that confuses low price with value. Nest matched consumers stated values with a product that satisfied those values, and justified a premium price point.

Google bought Nest in 2014 for $3.2 billion.

Promotion

Let’s run a promotion! Shout a little louder, bang a little harder, discount a little more. Blast out your message and just wait for the hordes of people to show up. That’s what promotion means.

There is a place for discounts, sales, and sweepstakes within inbound marketing, but there’s even more room for engaging with customers by listening to and interacting with them. Inbound marketers prefer to present meaningful content, relevant to the purchase path journey of the customer, over running promotions. Ideally, this creates a connection beyond mere product transactions. Certainly, some purchases are more transaction-driven than relationship-driven, but as an inbound marketer, you can engage with customers after the sale, even if your business model is considered a commoditized transaction. By encouraging reviews and by following up with customer-service information or surveys, you create a two-way conversation. Old-school promotions don’t do that. They shout at you rather than listen to you.

Profile/persona

Knowing the profiles of your key target customer groups is essential to communicating with those prospective customers. The more you know about who your buyers, shoppers, and non-buyers are, the better you can communicate to their individual needs. This is where profile development of personas plays a big part in developing your inbound plan.

A profile is an overview of your target customer group. A persona is an individual portrait of a buyer that you develop over time. Figure 8-4 shows an example portion of a director-of-marketing persona. By creating a persona description that zeroes in on the persona’s stated needs, your marketing communication becomes impactful and individualized. Using language that “speaks” to an individual persona increases listener acceptance, especially if we create an engagement opportunity — if, that is, we allow our customers to be heard, and if we listen and we respond appropriately.

For instance, for a business-to-business relationship it’s quite common to see two distinct buying groups: the end user and the procurement department. If you ran an e-commerce site that sells scientific lab equipment, the wants, needs, desires, and buying parameters of the scientist in the lab will be much different than those of the university accounting department. Talk about different needs and motivations!

Product

Of course, your product is still important; it’s how you satisfy customers and make money. If you view each product as an inverted pyramid you can see the product as a purchase process, and not simply as an object. Product pyramids are representative of the purchase process in that they’re three-dimensional. Each of your products has its own pyramid, which means each path to purchase is unique to that product. Consumers can migrate from one product pyramid to another; in fact you can encourage cross-pollination sales from one product pyramid to another by remarketing and retargeting after a sale conversion. You’ve probably already seen this on e-commerce sites: When you buy, say, a computer, and you suddenly see ads targeting products such as a charger or carrying case for your brand of computer, or for ancillary products that buyers like you also purchased.

Place in purchase cycle

Connecting with people is easiest when you greet them on their terms. That means your inbound marketing provides entry points other than the home page for visitors to enter your site. These could be onsite pages or landing pages providing entry at each of the four stages of the buying cycle.

Want to see how you’re doing in attracting visitors at multiple points on their purchase path? Check your Google Analytics. On the left, under Audience, click User Flow. (Figure 8-5 shows an example from my own website.) Your Users Flow page appears, and among the information here is the starting page where people enter your website. You can see that for my website, the page “/website-review” outperforms my home page “/” as a starting entry point. This means people who are either researching or shopping for a website review are entering directly into one of my product pyramid purchase paths (the one titled IMA) instead of having to navigate through the home page to seek and find the relevant information.

It’s usually a sign of good inbound marketing if pages other than your home page outrank your home page as the starting point. In this example, forcing a visitor to navigate through my home page to find the website review they’re seeking would cause unnecessary friction, taking more time and more clicks for a visitor to get where he’s going. In terms of user navigation, providing user shortcuts is usually preferable because it facilitates a positive UX by allowing customers to access their desired content quickly and increasing conversions as a result.

Purchase path

As you learned in Chapter 6, every one of your customers takes a unique path to purchase. Mapping your customers’ well-trodden paths to conversion is therefore of paramount importance to the inbound marketer who wishes to create connections at multiple times and at multiple points in the Lifestyle Loop.

Your call-to-action site map is designed with the Lifestyle Loop in mind. That is, by organizing pages that create a clear, simple path toward conversion, you make it easier for people to convert. Ideally, for any given product pyramid, your website’s user interface (UI) navigation path will direct people either horizontally across to like content or downward, closer to an action.

Your first onsite conversion will be the exchange of data during the research (top of funnel) and shopping stage (middle of funnel). To support an e-book, for example, you might provide eight-to-ten engaging blog posts. Each of those posts provides links to another blog in this content group, creating horizontal movement through the Lifestyle Loop. Additionally, each of these posts engages with your visitor with a call-to-action to download your e-book, encouraging downward migration in the Loop and your first conversion. Likewise, your follow-up messaging after the initial download may offer another horizontal CTA, stimulating additional downloading of research/shopping information as well as a vertically downward CTA to encourage, say, a product demo.

Too often, websites provide encouragement only at the bottom of the loop, in a “Contact Us” form, when in reality the majority of your visitors aren’t ready to contact you because they’re not yet buying; they’re only researching or shopping. Of course, you want to provide encouragement to buy or to engage closer to an ultimate action, but this shouldn’t be the only CTA on your website.

Search engine marketing(SEM)

Search engine marketing (SEM) used to be the broad term for digital marketing efforts designed to attract people to your website. Most often, SEM referred to paid search efforts and search engine optimization (SEO). Nowadays, search professionals often use the terms SEM and paid search (not just PPC) synonymously. To avoid confusion, in this book I refer to search engine optimization as SEO and to paid search as either SEM or PPC.

Search engine optimization(SEO)

The most authentic inbound method of attraction under SEM is SEO. Search engine optimization is the practice of assessing and applying an ever-changing set of criteria (mostly dictated by Google) to boost your organic rankings on the search engine results page. SEO consists of:

• Onsite optimization: By this I mean organizing, titling, and publishing in a manner that is easy for the search engines to crawl and evaluate. This includes optimizing the speed at which your website loads, your content, and the titles of your pages and images.
• Links: Is your website fully connected and has no dead-end 404-Errors? How many links do you have from credible websites whose authority Google trusts? Where do your internal website links connect?
• Mobile access: Is your website mobile friendly? I list this as its own SEO factor (separate from onsite optimization) because its importance increases as Internet access from mobile devices increases. Google announced algorithm changes in April 2015, specifically identifying mobile as an increased ranking factor, so it’s now a key contributing factor to SEO.

In Chapter 7 I discuss the correlation between a higher organic ranking and CTRs, especially for the top three SERP positions. More searchers click on organic results than paid search ads. So ranking for your brand terms and for your targeted keywords adds greatly to your inbound attraction factor. As the competition increases and opportunities to rank on page one grow scarcer, it becomes even more important to attract based on satisfying a searcher, rather than on satisfying Google. That’s not to say you shouldn’t organize your website and publish your content to Google’s standards; you should. Elevating your content to first serve your target customers is of primary importance to your inbound marketing because people buy products; search engines don’t.

Paid search

Paid search is paid digital advertising (as opposed to earned or owned digital media) and includes pay-per-click ads on search engines, display banner ads on websites and social media platforms, and sponsorships on social media sites. Some inbound purists don’t include paid search as an attraction factor because you have to pay for it and because some forms of paid search (banner ads, pop-ups) can be considered interruptive ads. Although it’s somewhat true that some of these ads are interruptive, paid search continues to attract. I believe that serving up relevant ads that speak directly to the search term — whether they’re paid search or not — qualifies as a good inbound marketing practice. Many websites drive more traffic from paid search than from organic or from social media, so to ignore paid search’s importance to attracting visitors would be setting yourself up to fail. Here are some paid search avenues:

• Pay-per-click (PPC): The three largest PPC providers are:
  • Google (https://www.google.com/adwords)
  • Bing (http://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/home)
  • Yahoo! (https://advertising.yahoo.com)
• Banner ads
• Facebook ads (https://www.facebook.com/advertising)
• Retargeting ads: Popular retargeting ad providers include:
  • AdRoll (www.adroll.com/retargeting)
  • ReTargeter (www.retargeter.com)
  • Chango (www.chango.com)
• LinkedIn ads (www.linkedin.com/ads/)
• Twitter sponsorship (www.ads.twitter.com)
• Pinterest “Promoted Pins” (https://ads.pinterest.com)

Content marketing

Great content attracts. For more about content, see Part IV.

Email remarketing

Implementing email remarketing is a fundamental part of your inbound marketing. Your email remarketing campaigns create the “loop” of the Lifestyle Loop by reattracting and reengaging those visitors and prospects who have fallen off the purchase path. Understanding your profile customers’ purchase paths helps you follow up with automated email campaigns. So, knowing where your visitors enter and exit your website helps define their location in the purchase path. With that information you can craft emails that encourage revisits to relevant website pages. Following up with relevant and timely emails based on that persona’s place in the product pyramid helps you catch prospects that slip through the cracks. (I cover more on email remarketing in Chapter 18.)

Social media

Social media makes it easier than ever to connect with your tribe. Your attractive interactions on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and other social media channels are inbound inputs whose impact can be measured and monetized.

Traditional media

Traditional media attracts, but unless it’s integrated into your inbound plan — that is, unless it specifically directs traffic to your website — it has less impact on your online attraction factor. So a traditional newspaper ad, even one featuring your website URL address, is less impactful than a traditional terrestrial radio ad that advertises an ecommerce site. A digital radio ad on Pandora, say, has more impact than either the newspaper ad or the terrestrial radio ad because listeners to Pandora can actually click through to your website. Although traditional media can be part of your attraction factor, it’s more common for it to be separated from your inbound marketing and its desired outcomes.