Many PR people talk about the importance of "crisis communication" when it comes to social media. But, very few talk about how to respond to positive messages people share about a company. 

A Worcester native, Bill Randell, started a contest to petition JetBlue to start flights out of the Worcester airport. Here's a good story from the Worcester Telegram and Gazette about the contest. Bill offered $2k to the best video. Each video must petition JetBlue to come to Worcester.

Here's an example that was created by a buddy of mine and his daughter. I may be a bit biased, but I think this is the cutest and funniest video out of the ones I've watched.

JetBlue noticed the competition and they also created a cute funny video in response to it.



Whether JetBlue comes to Worcester or not, Worcester residents will no doubt think of JetBlue as a cool company. They demonstrated that they're listening. And by relating to how most people struggle with pronouncing the name of the city like natives do (you have to watch their video to know what I'm talking about), Worcester natives will feel like they share a common joke with JetBlue. They not only responded, they related.

When people fail at inbound marketing, it's usually because they didn't do what the experts told them to do for some reason. Maybe they weren't capable, they didn't listen, they didn't prioritize it or they didn't believe it would work for them. But, tactically speaking, there are also many things that inbound marketing failures don't do, don't do right or don't do frequently enough.

Below are the most important things that unsuccessful inbound marketers should have done. I could have included, "they didn't use twitter properly". But nobody fails at inbound marketing because they didn't grow their twitter follower count fast enough.

Companies fail at inbound marketing because of the following bulleted list of things. I've put these in a specific sequence. I don't think I could tell you which failures happen more often than others. But, the things at the top of the list are the first hurdles that companies run into. And if they don't get over these first few hurdles, they don't usually have enough success to hit the roadblocks later in this list:

1. They don't blog frequently enough. You can't grow traffic without blogging consistently, as in multiple times per week. You can't grow search traffic and social traffic withouth blogging consistently.
2. They don't create enough educational, top-of-the-funnel offers. They don't create ebooks and webinars that entice anonymous website visitors to share their contact information in exchange for these free educational materials.
3. They don't put [at least some of their] educational offers behind landing pages. They just give them away. People download them, and never come back. And since the company didn't collect their information, they have no way to market or sell to them.
4. They don't drive traffic to their landing pages using calls-to-action (CTA) buttons and text. They don't place CTAs in blog posts, in email campaigns or on their home page. They don't promote landing pages on social media and don't optimize them for search. Some fools don't even point their pay-per-click traffic to landing pages using compelling calls to action in their ad copy.
5. They don't nurture their leads using email marketing frequently enough. Once they capture the lead, they don't send any more educational content to the lead. They don't effectively establish themselves as a credible resource that provides ongoing value.
6. They don't call their leads. Way too many companies either wait for their leads to call them by phone or to fill out a form that says "call me please". Before the days of inbound marketing, salespeople didn't wait for people to call them. Buyers are less receptive to being interrupted these days, but they haven't suddenly decided to buy more things more proactively on blind faith only after reading someone's content. If someone shares their contact information on a form on your website, and they fit your ideal persona, you should be trying to connect with them.
7. They give up trying to connect with leads after 1 or 2 attempts. Companies who successfully leverage inbound marketing to grow sales call their leads 5-8 times over several weeks. And then again if they revisit their website. Really good salespeople won't let that good lead get away without connecting with them. They'll try for a long, long time to initiate a conversation. They'll use social media, email, voicemails and introductions from mutual contacts as ways to get in contact.
8. They don't know how to engage a lead who isn't ready to talk about their company's product or services yet. They get frustrated because leads aren't ready to talk about doing business right away, like a qualified referral often is. Most inbound leads aren't as warm as referrals, unfortunately. Salespeople who cold call are excellent at building rapport, establishing relevance via positioning statements and credibility through asking the right questions. These prospecting skills are absolutely critical for turning inbound leads into sales.
9. They don't have a consultative sales process that identifies a prospect's goals and challenges and then relates those goals and challenges to the right solution using the products and services that their company provides. Salespeople must be able to co-create a plan with the prospect that will help them. They must have the sales skills for this job and a process that demonstrates their ability to deliver value successfully post-sale.

These are the main reasons why companies fail to grow their traffic, leads and sales using inbound marketing. Yes, you can get away with not doing some of these things. But, companies who do all of these things will be the most successful.

Which mistakes do you see company's making? How have you helped them overcome these challenges? Which mistakes are you making? How have you overcome these challenges?

People hire experts because experts can help them overcome challenges more efficiently and effectively, usually at lower overall cost. Experts have figured things out before and are good at applying their expertise in similar situations. Yet, every day, people decide to try and figure things out themselves. How much money and time are you losing by trying to figure things out yourself?

The Difference Between "Doing it Yourself" and "Figuring it Out Yourself"

At HubSpot, we started by selling a "do it yourself" approach to internet marketing, where we taught small business owners and in-house marketers how to do inbound marketing themselves. We packaged training on our inbound marketing methodology with our software, so customers didn't have to figure out internet marketing on their own and could benefit from all of our experience and data packaged up into a simple step-by-step process. A popular phrase amongst sales people at HubSpot is "You can do it! We can help!", which we obviously borrowed from someone else you've undoubtedly used to try and figure out how to do a home improvement project yourself. We still offer this approach. It's the approach that most of our direct sales team pitches, even though they've referred $6M+ worth of marketing services business to our agency partners. Since our marketing team publishes loads of educational material on "how to do internet marketing", we tend to attract an audience that wants tihs approach. As you can see from our internet marketing case studies, it works.

Our partners, who tend to get much of their new business through a combination of networking, previous clients and their own inbound marketing, tend to sell to companies who are a bit less educated about internet marketing and a lot less eager to "do it themselves". They typically secure new clients who want the "do it for me" approach; they typically sell marketing services retainers.

A Story of a Small Business Owner Who Chose to Try and Figure it Out Himself

A few months back, I joined a call with an agency partner and their prospect. As a relatively new company, the prospect had balked at the agency's retainer price. I suggested that we identify whether a hybrid approach would work for the prospect where a) the client did a lot of the work and b) the agency did the heavy lifting and coaching. Many of our partners take this hybrid approach when their clients have in-house staff who can create content, man social media and learn how to use parts of our software to do things like building landing pages and sending email campaigns.

On the call, I asked the prospect, "What does your day look like now? What do you do every day?" He proceeded to tell us that he spends 2 hours per day reading blogs about internet marketing. I asked him, "How that's working for you?" He didn't appreciate me challenging him and that's when I started to think that he wasn't going to buy anything. I then asked him, "Do you think that hiring an expert to advise you on what to do 1st, 2nd and 100th would be more effective for you vs trying to read lots of blogs and figure it out yourself?" He said that he had considered it and that's why he was talking to us. I then asked him if he understood that the more quality blog content he produces, the more qualified traffic he'll get to his website. He said he would run out of things to write about. I informed him that our partner has ways of helping him come up with content and that if he wanted us to, we could do some searches right now to come up with ideas that he hadn't considered. I then said that "Our partner has done this for many clients. I can assure that you coming up with content ideas will not be a problem after doing some basic keyword and market research."  He then pushed back and said he wouldn't have time to write more articles and that he'd be worried about the quality of the content.  I addressed this partially, but not to his satisfaction. He wasn't really open to the conversation. To fully disqualify him, I then switched to budget qualification and asked him, "If we could define a program where you do more of the work and our partner does some of the work and guides you, what could you invest?" He didn't give me a straight answer. I left the conversation with, "I don't think this is a fit for you. There's certain things that we know must be done in order to be successful. And if you can't invest atleast $1,000 per month, our partner can't help you." He didn't like hearing that either, but at this point it was safe to say that he wasn't ready to get any help.

In this case, he wanted to not only 'do it himself', he also wanted to figure it out himself.  He wasn't really open to hearing how to do inbound marketing effectively from an expert. I checked out his site today and he hasn't done any of the stuff our partner suggested during the sales process. He hasn't created more content, has no calls to action, no educational offers behind landing pages, and he doesn't have any marketing analytics tracking code installed. He's probably still spending 2 hours a day reading about internet marketing, instead of doing it. He's trying to figure out how to do it himself, but in reality, he's not doing anything much. In my experience, most people who try to figure it out themselves, end up making very little progress towards their goals. They end up just researching and thinking about it. Even if they do something, they're often doing the wrong things in the wrong order.

How Much is "Figuring it Out on Your Own" Costing You?

There's a lot of small business owners and executives with this same problem as the guy above. The problem isn't unique to selling internet marketing services or to small business owners. Every day, people decide to try and figure stuff out themselves, instead of relying on an expert who has done it 1,000s of times before. Usually that costs them lost time and lost money.

Do you run into prospects like this? What is it costing them? Are you like this? How much time and money are you losing trying to figure stuff out yourself?

Every day when I get home and see my wife and son, I have that little feeling in my belly. It's an involuntary feeling that I get when I'm happy. I believe other people get this too. Right?

While lead intelligence is nowhere near as important to me as them, I also love knowing what pages my leads are looking at. I'm very excited about building out the Collaborative Growth Network and getting a bunch of the awesome-est inbound marketing agencies to work together to grow their respective businesses. 

So, when I saw that Ryan Malone applied, I got that little feeling. I got really excited when I saw that he's been reading all about Inbound Networking. It's not that I love Ryan Malone like I love my wife, but I respect and like Ryan Malone a lot. He runs a great inbound marketing agency, SmartBug Media. And I'm looking forward to connecting with him to discuss.

Check your inbox, Ryan. (Sorry for the very awkward post.)

I'm excited to announce the first four members of the Collaborative Growth Network. I've been taking my time, ensuring that each new member is committed to the inbound networking process, to the success of the group and - most importantly - to helping each other GROW!

One lesson I've learned with inbound marketing is that there is often a big difference between the people who "say" they do inbound marketing and the people who actually follow the inbound marketing methodology. The latter tend to grow traffic, leads and sales over time much more predictably and signifcantly. So, while others might take shortcuts with what they're calling inbound networking, I'm making sure my group is committed to doing it the right way. Inbound Networking is not just a series of guest blog posts and a discussion forum. It is a full methodology for companies to collaborate to grow each other's traffic, leads and sales predictably, measurably and most importantly: faster than doing inbound marketing by themselves.

That said, if I haven't reached out to you yet to interview you for the group, it's not because I don't want to. I now have a fancy new landing page for anyone that is interested in being part of the group.

Without further ado, here are the first four members.

1. PR 20/20 - The first and one of the premier inbound marketing agencies in the world. Lead by visionary and author, Paul Roetzer, and backed by a team of stellar strategists, marketers and account management ninjas.
2. Impact Branding & Design - A relatively new inbound marketing agency who has achieved so much growth for themselves and their clients in a short amount of time, with no signs of slowing down. They are amazing content creators, producing some of the best educational content on inbound marketing of any agency I watch. Their volume of high quality content rivals HubSpot's own marketing team.
3. Top Line Results - A sales and marketing expert who has built a very profitable and growing family-run agency, by focusing on helping manufacturing clients grow their business through strategy and execution of sales and marketing excellence.
4. Stream Creative - An amazing group of designers turned inbound marketers, who've built a growing agency by delivering great design + great results to clients and their agency partners.

They've submitted their first guest posts to the Co-Grow group blog and I've been honored to publish them.

1. PR 20/20: B2B Marketer's Guide to Going Inbound
2. Impact Branding & Design: How an Agency Acquired 5 New Clients in Less Than 6 Months Using Inbound Marketing
3. Stream Creative: How a Resort Collaborated with their Competition to Reel In Sales
4. Top Line Results: Business Trends That Make the Case for Inbound Networking

If you're interested in joining the group and we don't have a 1:1 call set up yet, please complete this fancy new application form I've built. Apply now.

Video featuring HubSpot's Partner Marketing Manager, Patrick Shea (@mpatrickshea):



Video featuring HubSpot's VP People, Andrew Quinn (@andrewtquinn)

Learn more about the Inbound 2012 Conference.

Great social media checklist infographic from HubSpot customer and partner: The Whole Brain Group.

Mary Planding, owner of Inbound Marketing Squad (@inboundsquad), told me today that she's attended 10 small business networking meetings in the last several weeks. She's sharing the concept of inbound networking with the people she meets.

As a result of her conversations, she's refined her explanation of inbound networking: the why's and the how's. Similar to High Mobley's guest post last week, she's written an excellent article about why very small business owners (VSBO) should join an inbound networking group.

Here's some excerpts:

• "Most VSBOs rely on word-of-mouth referrals for the bulk of their business. They also admit those referrals aren't enough to grow their business to the level they want or need."
• "How can you leverage the power of a marketing agency's expertise to grow your business without going broke? How can you take advantage of the most cost-effective marketing strategies out there, without having to become a full-time marketing guru?"
• "When the power of inbound marketing is combined with the reach of business networking, you get — inbound networking."
• Instead of going for it all by yourself — imagine being an active member of a content rich website focused on the ideal buyer you're trying to reach. Imagine that the other chosen members of this content rich website have complimentary, non-competing businesses.
• Each of you regularly: contributes content to this website, shares one another's content with your social networks, and cross-promotes each other's products and services.

I believe Mary has put together the best explanation and business case yet for inbound networking. Not to mention a cool graphic. (See above.)  Go read the entire article. Also notice the call to action and the application form she created, so businesses can apply to be a member of one of her groups. Nice inbound marketing, Mary!

A long time ago, when we were onboarding our first customers at HubSpot, someone asked one of our consultants to visit their company, talk with their executives and come up with an internet marketing strategy for them. His response was, "No. Here's the damn [inbound marketing] process. Just follow it." While his response probably could have been slightly softened, it is true.

Joel Gerdis at the Content Squad describes the 'value of an internet marketing process' in a bit more detail.

Let's take the mystery out of SEO and inbound marketing. When you work a real strategy and comprehensive plan you have set goals, expectations, and benchmarks you want to achieve. This is where it gets exciting for businesses when you tell them, "here is the process and here is what you should expect in two months." When two months have passed and the goals are nearly achieved, are reached, or are exceeded, clients' eyes get a little bigger and trust is developing. Every month you are getting valuable analytics that verify you are on the right track and the process is refined to improve the results. Where is the end of the refinement? There is no end to the refinement. You continually analyze the data, your effort, and make subtle changes that can have significant results for the program.

When a client works with an agency with defined processes and those processes help the client achieve their sales and marketing goals, things go swimmingly. The Content Squad knows because they achieve it with their clients, by following the right processes.

Today, more than 350 business owners and marketers attended the first session of a two day workshop to help them set business, sales and marketing goals. Tomorrow's session will teach them how another business used the 'inbound marketing process' to exceed their goals handsomely. If you haven't written your goals, created a plan to get there and adopted the processes to implement the plan, you're a step behind the rest. You should tune in and learn the process.

At HubSpot, more than 900 agencies have decided to invest in learning inbound marketing the way that HubSpot teaches it. I would hazard to guess that there are several hundred more agencies who have decided to launch 'inbound marketing services' without partnering with HubSpot too. Some of our new partners launch inbound marketing services with more vigor than others. Some add it to their current offerings. Some take a right turn and begin exclusively offering inbound marketing services to clients. Some try to meld inbound with outbound.  Some take 12 months to learn before they start offering inbound services. No matter what they do, many agencies are offering inbound marketing services these days. 

Yesterday, I was copied on an email that said, "We have changed our minds and have decided to expand into offering inbound marketing services. We plan to add search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM) and social media management services (SMM) to our offerings. Can we resume our conversation?" First, I looked at their website, assuming they were already offering lead generation and marketing automation services. They weren't. A bit frustrated, I was very tempted to write back and say, "THIS IS THE DEFINITION OF INBOUND MARKETING. SEO, SEM and SMM is 1/4th of the process. You must then help your clients turn that traffic into leads, turn those leads into sales and use analytics to help them continuously improve results." Luckily, one of team members responded first with, "When would you like to schedule a call?" Argument averted.

The other day, when I announced that I am launching an inbound networking group for marketing agencies, John McTigue left a comment that got me thinking: (Minor edits.)

"I would actually be even more interested in getting together some of the best minds in the business to create a special consortium, like the W3C, to help drive best practices in digital marketing. [The group would] provide thought leadership. With HubSpot's backing in spirit, this could become a go-to resource for anyone interested in doing things the right way. By becoming a member and participating, each network agency would have the opportunity to raise their profile. The goal would be greater awareness of best practices from an independent body."

Years ago, when HubSpot launched the Inbound Marketing University and the inbound movement began in earnest, I had suggested we develop an inbound oath. We never did that. Today it feels like the inbound marketing agency migration is in full swing, and more and more agencies have adopted the moniker, 'inbound marketing agency'. The time to create an oath  feels like it is now. There are way too many agencies saying that they are inbound agencies without really understanding how to produce a measurable, predictable and improvable ROI for their clients. There's lots of agencies giving it a bad name. They are..

• selling 'inbound marketing' projects or short term 'inbound' engagements,
• espousing content creation without knowing how to use it for lead generation and nurturing,
• letting clients pick and choose services instead of making the right tactical recommendations at the right frequency in the right sequence,
• selling it evangelically instead of based on client goals,
• not involving clients in their service delivery processes,
• making it seem like a mystery instead of transparently reporting results...
• and many many more bad agency habits. 

There are even many agencies that are making it up as they go along, just like agencies usually do. So, before the term gets watered down and means nothing, the ones that "do things the right way" should probably help to establish best practice.

What do you guys think? Should we create this oath? What should be on it?