I'm excited that the first 'inbound networking group' launched their website and has begun processing member applications. I asked High Mobley & Larry Holmes, founders of TheBusinessAdvisors.org to write up their thoughts on inbound networking and why they're starting their group. Their article is below. If you're an owner of a B2B company and want to use inbound networking to reach business owners and entrepreneurs near Las Vegas, Nevada, you can apply to join TheBusinessAdvisors.org.

When Pete Caputa, Director of HubSpot's Agency Partnership Program, began writing about the concept of Inbound Networking recently, I got very excited. It's sort of a mashup of inbound marketing and referral networking, pioneered by HubSpot and Business Networking International (BNI), respectively. I got excited because I'm a fan of both. Inbound marketing is the most effective approach I've seen to online marketing, and I'm a big advocate of both the inbound marketing methodology and HubSpot's all-in-one marketing software. But inbound marketing is difficult for very small businesses (VSBs). To be successful with inbound marketing, very small businesses must invest significant time and/or money. So, I'm excited to combine business networking with inbound marketing, so we can reduce the effort, while improving the lead generation results.

We've started our Inbound Networking group and site at TheBusinessAdvisors.org. Our group will be made up of businesses who sell to other businesses, often referred to as B2B.  We’re providing our members the ability to implement inbound marketing for their business with the guidance of an online marketing agency. By pooling resources, we can offer this at an affordable price and a much lower time commitment. Our members will work together to build a following of their target prospects: local business owners and executives. By working together, they'll build their following much larger and much faster than any one member could achieve alone.

Why is Inbound Networking such a big deal?

To see results from inbound marketing within a reasonable time frame, a business owner should write several blog posts per week, as well as launch and promote one or two landing page offers per month. That's an onerous pace for the typical small business owner, even if she has a small staff or other assistance. Plus, she would need to spend a lot of time over the first few months reading documentation, taking training classes, and consulting with experts to learn how to use inbound marketing software and tactics.

You might suggest that a business owner should pay someone to help her or just do the work for her. Unfortunately, for an inbound marketing agency to provide these services to a company, they typically need to charge $2,000/month or more. There are more affordable options for content creation and graphics work, but then the business owner would need to proof and edit the blog articles herself and manage another contractor for the graphics work. Some agencies will start at lower fees, but spending less than 20 or so hours per month on inbound marketing delays traffic and lead growth. While many companies devote the time and money needed to achieve great inbound marketing success, many companies don't ever get started.

Enter Inbound Networking for the win!

So what's a small business owner to do if she wants to use inbound marketing but has neither the time nor the budget to do it effectively? Inbound Networking puts many of these small business owners together to create one web site where they can collectively publish lots of great content. For example, an Inbound Networking group of 20 members - who each write just one post per month - would publish five new articles a week to their group blog! That kind of frequency makes for a very strong site in the eyes of search engines. But, it's not just  search engine rankings that benefit from the group collaboration of Inbound Networking. By promoting one another's blogs and landing pages, each member gets exposure to a much larger social media following than she could hope to accumulate alone. If each of these 20 group members has a social media following of just 250 people, then there are 5,000 potential customers on social media who could see the links to the blog posts and landing pages of all the group’s members! The reach of the group starts to grow even more rapidly once they begin employing opt-in email marketing and automated lead nurturing to further promote each other's content and offers.

The Inbound Networking Takeaway

It comes down to this: A group of small companies with a common target market are far more effective together than they are individually. Inbound Networkers have access to more inbound marketing resources at a lower cost of both cash and time than any single member could manage by herself. Even more importantly, they can produce better results more quickly by working together.

As Director of HubSpot's Partner Program for Agencies, I have the pleasure of working with lots of great marketing agencies.

In the past six months, one relatively new partner has done extremely well. Based on their  marketing and sales success in the last few months, I asked Bob Ruffolo, CEO of IMPACT Branding & Design, if I could interview him and share some of his secrets to success. In the past 6 months, his team has accomplished the following feats:

1. Grown traffic 7x to 14,000 visits/month.
2. Grown leads 9x to 450 leads/month.
3. Switched the majority of his clients from one time project clients to recurring revenue retainer clients.
4. Acquired 6 new retainer clients from inbound leads.

IMPACT is an 11 person inbound marketing agency, founded in 2009, based in Wallingford, CT. The following is what I’ve learned from talking with Ruffolo.

Blog Consistently

As inbound marketers know, blogging has become an essential tool for attracting more and more traffic and leads over time. Not only will blogging generate more indexed pages for the search engines and attract inbound links to help increase search engine authority for a site, but it also provides shareable content to help attract followers and traffic from social media sites. However, this can’t be achieved without high blog frequency. IMPACT has been publishing blog posts every day for the past six months and has attracted over 300 new blog subscribers in less than six months, as can be seen in the graph below.

Blogging consistently is only half of the battle according to Ruffolo. In order for blog articles to be optimized for the search engines and social media, they've invested time in coming up with powerful blog titles that are designed to attract attention. This means carefully integrating keywords and phrases into the titles for search engine optimization and catchy titles that make the content more share-worthy via social media. It also means including calls-to-action on each blog post, so that each post generates leads.

Build Lots of Offers and Landing Pages

As soon as Bob's team started their inbound marketing, they committed to creating lots of offers. While the blog is the engine for traffic acquisition, offers and landing pages have been key for lead generation. Knowing that most site visitors aren't ready to talk to a company about hiring them, they spent time creating a variety of offers that appeal to visitors at all stages of their research and buying process. Once the offer is created, the next step is creating a lead generating landing page that entices visitors to submit their contact information, thereby becoming a lead.  “They need to feel as if they’re missing out on a great opportunity if they don’t download the offer,” said Ruffolo.

IMPACT has created 4 different types of offers: ebooks, whitepapers, free demos and free consultations. IMPACT has seen a high visit to lead conversion rate for the landing pages where they give away their ebooks and whitepapers, when compared to the conversion rates achieved on their demo and consultation request landing pages. While they've also acquired new clients via their ebooks and whitepapers,  their biggest new client came directly from a consultation offer. Below is a screenshot of a landing page with an ebook offer.

Promote Offers via Website, Blogs, Social Media & Email

Impact continuously promotes more than 50 landing pages, and has improved overall submission rate to 25% last month, meaning 1 out of 4 people who view one of their landing pages, completes the form and becomes a contact in their marketing database.  IMPACT has been successful promoting their offers because they promote them continuously through multiple channels including: their website pages, blog posts, social media, email marketing and even networking events and tradeshows.  By promoting offers daily, IMPACT has generated over 200 leads in a 6-month period from Twitter alone. Blogs have been another effective resource for promoting their offers as well. They also employ email signatures and email campaigns, driving traffic to their offers, helping to further nurture and educate their contacts.  And while email blasts are effective in generating leads, this method should be approached with caution. After promoting some demo and consultation offers via email,  Ruffolo discovered that promoting offers through email has proven to be effective as long as the offers are educational.  Below, you can see the variety of landing pages and offers that have strong visit-to-lead conversion rates. Because they have high conversion rates, IMPACT promotes these offers more frequently.

Analyze for Continuous Improvement

According to Ruffolo, one of the best methods for generating effective offers is to analyze what’s already working. Through HubSpot’s software, Ruffolo and his team continuously track and measure the success of their landing pages and blog articles. They closely track which traffic source and marketing tactic produce the best leads and new clients, using the Sources report in their HubSpot portal. Below is a screenshot of their data from that report.

IMPACT reviews data for each activity they do, especially each blog post and each offer. Choosing blog articles to write is a simple process. They look at which ones are getting the most views and write more articles that are similar in style and topic to those. Landing page conversions require a little more thought and creativity. The IMPACT team is constantly reviewing their landing page conversions to determine which are doing great and which may need a little tweaking to reach peak performance. In the past six months alone, IMPACT landing pages have generated 2,827 leads from a total of 14,812 views, good for about a 20% conversion rate. Overall, as can be seen from the screenshot above, IMPACT now generates 400+ leads per month through their website.

Align Sales with Marketing

In order to develop an effective marketing plan, IMPACT has learned that it’s critical to trace every sale back to the marketing activities that generated and nurtured the opportunity. Ruffolo says he works hard to integrate the marketing and sales process, as it enables his team to shift their marketing focus to the right channels.

It’s equally important to trace a lead's website activity and how it relates to the sales process. Ruffolo also shared with us a behind-the-scenes look at his sales process. "Kevin Linehan, our channel account manager from HubSpot, helped me set up the customer settings needed to successfully integrate HubSpot and Salesforce,” said Ruffolo. “I was then able to see new leads as they came in, what offers they converted upon, pages they viewed and when and how often they revisit our site. This has helped me prioritize my sales efforts on the best leads and given me great data to improve my connect rate."

IMPACT also uses automated lead nurturing to move leads into a buying process more effectively. After modifying its lead nurturing campaign based on click through rates and close rates, IMPACT generated more sales ready leads, making Ruffolo's sales efforts even more productive.  Ruffolo indicated that his team went through a process of categorizing all of their offers, so they could correlate what stage of the buying cycle someone would be if they downloaded it. From there, it was easier to identify what message to send to get the lead to re-convert and become a more educated, more sales ready lead.  "All of our lead nurturing emails were aimed at pushing them further down the sales funnel," said Ruffolo. “We found that after two or three conversions, our leads were coming through a lot more sales ready."

Ruffolo added that as his team went through some of their more advanced offers, the forms on the landing pages got longer as a result. “We were capturing more information,” said Ruffolo. "We added a question to determine whether they needed a service like ours and also a field that asked them how many employees work at their company. If their company needs our services and had 50 to 200 employees, we followed up quickly and persistently in order to schedule a conversation.”

Adopt a Consultative Sales Process

Once a sales-ready lead was generated, a member of the IMPACT team is tasked with reaching out and connecting. If they did not connect on the first dial, they stay persistent, employing a  BASHO sequence, which consists of continuous voicemails and emails. Once that connection is made, an Inbound Marketing Assessment (IMA) is scheduled, where the goals, challenges, timeline, and budget are discussed, among other things.  “We know that we’ve completely qualified the opportunity when the opportunity believes we can help them solve their problems and achieve their goals. We don't move on to our next step until we've  accomplished that,” said Ruffolo.

The next step usually consists of a demonstration of the inbound marketing methodology and HubSpot, where Ruffolo would highlight the inbound marketing process and also educate the prospect on how IMPACT's services will help them overcome their challenges and achieve their goals. From there, responsibilities of both parties are clearly defined, and a customized program is created that caters to clients specific needs. Once the agreement is signed, the IMPACT team goes to work.

The Results

In the month of May alone, IMPACT brought on five new retainer clients. Implementing inbound marketing and a needs-based sales process has helped IMPACT grow recurring revenue by over 350% in a six-month span. 

One story, Ruffolo enjoyed telling me was about a recent client addition. After going through the entire sales process, the prospect indicated that while it all sounded great, he just couldn’t afford it at the moment. Three months later, the prospect called back and was ready to get started. “Within one meeting, we had a contract and were ready to get started,” said Ruffolo. “That proves that inbound lead generation and the retainer sales process really works.”

Another recent client that just began working with IMPACT, started from an inbound call. The prospect called IMPACT and after talking with Ruffolo, told him that he had received a quote from another firm, but decided not to hire them. The other agency had included an infographic about inbound marketing in their proposal that was originally created and published by IMPACT. The prospect said that he'd rather work with the "inbound marketing expert" who created it. They then hired IMPACT.

Ruffolo is extremely thankful for his success to date. He exhibits an uncommon humility for a business owner who has achieved rapid success in a short amount of time. I'm particularly impressed with his ability to take training and coaching and execute on a plan flawlessly. While we've provided a roadmap for IMPACT to follow via HubSpot's program for agencies, Ruffolo and his team have picked it up and applied faster and better than anyone else I've seen recently. When talking to him again last Friday, I learned more about the next steps for his firm: he's adding staff, focusing on producing successful results for clients, and continuing to analyze and improve his sales, marketing and services delivery processes.  I'm sure I'll be interviewing Ruffolo again. Until then, I'd recommend watching IMPACT closely. I expect great things.

I've been speaking with many of HubSpot's top partners about joining my inbound networking group for inbound marketing agencies. As I've discussed it with more people, I've been refining how I explain it. I've also been searching for that big hairy audacious goal that gets me and my future members excited, committed and motivated.

Here's the story I've been telling...

I want to create an alternative HubSpot universe. Currently, HubSpot generates 50,000 leads per month through HubSpot.com. I don't know the exact count, but there are 20+ marketers who pull this off. They are a highly coordinated, highly skilled, finely tuned marketing machine. Minus a few segments we can't serve effectively ourselves, all of those leads go to our direct sales team.  HubSpot's direct sales team is also a finely tuned, highly skilled, highly disciplined sales machine.

The alternative universe I want to create is a world where 100s of marketing agencies work together to generate 50k leads/month and the leads go directly to them. Right now, HubSpot's 20ish marketers create 50+ blog posts and 15+ ebooks and webinars per month. Imagine what several hundred marketing agencies could produce if they worked together to create and promote their content. The problem is that marketing agencies are doing this on their own sites and they don't have the authority, the following, the reputation that HubSpot has. Their content doesn't get as much of an audience. They don't have 100s of employees, 100s of partners and 100s of thousands of fans, blog and email subscribers who share their content. They don't have a huge machine built.

There are 10s of thousands of small marketing agencies in the US alone. Many have taken to the web - trying to break through the clutter and noise - and establish themselves as thought leaders, above the competition. Very few do.  Most struggle. Some even give up. But, what if a few 100 of them decided to leave the rest in the dust by working together? How successful can these few hundred be?

Stay tuned: I'll be announcing the first few members soon. If you're interested and we haven't talked yet, leave a comment on this post. If you've reached out to me and we haven't spoken, I'm sorry. Please be persistent. I'm prioritizing my 1:1 conversations with top HubSpot partners first.

All star inbound marketing agency, Adhere Creative, has a great post today about how 'content marketing' is the new SEO. I 100% agree that 'technical SEO' is all but irrelevant for everyone except high traffic sites and that most companies should just focus on creating lots of great content. Another steller inbound agency, Synecore, posted a great story about a company who built up traffic to 100k visits/month through content marketing and very little technical SEO. I'm seeing agency after agency and marketer after marketer embrace inbound marketing through content. Many are public about their successes. This is a marked difference with what I'm hearing from technical SEO experts. Technical SEO experts are very private about their successes and failures. But, if the recent horror stories I'm hearing from technical SEO experts keep at the current pace, we should all be ready to call it a game soon.

Both of these articles talk about the importance of keyword research and some link building as part of the content marketing strategy, which are certainly 2 SEO strategies. But, while many SEO companies still put a large emphasis on all forms of link building, content marketers seem to universally suggest 'guest posting' as the best form of link building.

In their list of 5 great tips, Adhere includes 'collaboration' as a suggestion for generating links as well as growing social media reach:

Even though the old days are over, the new SEO landscape is still competitive. You need allies who will partner with you and endorse your brand through guest-posting opportunities, social media promotion, and co-branded marketing campaigns. Partner with like-minded companies with complementary products or services. You have a similar target market, why not work together to reach them?

Sounds like inbound networking to me. Seeing all of these great marketing firms get it, makes me very excited about building an inbound networking group for inbound marketing agencies.

In a blog post, Rich Mcelnany asked the question, "Does Inbound Marketing Mean I Can Give Up Those Chamber Meetings?" I 100% agree with his answer, "But I don't think I'd ever recommend foregoing those person-to-person connections at industry events and local networking meetings." I'd take it a step further and recommend that businesses learn how to mix their 1-on-1 networking activities with their online marketing, in order to achieve greater lead generation results. 

When introducing the concept of inbound marketing to people who are unfamiliar with it, I've heard lots of different uninformed objections:

1. My target audience is not online.
2. All of my customers hear about me from other customers.
3. I prefer introductions from people who know me.
4. I only want local customers.
5. People who find me through my website never end up doing business with me. 

My next two questions are, "Do you get most of your business from referrals?" and "Do you get enough referrals, consistently enough, to get to your revenue goals?". The usual answer is  "yes" and "no". So, we then introduce them to inbound marketing.

Unfortunately, many times, people see "inbound marketing" as something entirely different from their 1-on-1 networking, designed to produce a different and separate stream of leads. That's the wrong way of looking at it. Companies should see the two as inter-twined. When combined, they both will have better results. Imagine, for example, the following scenarios:

1. Your best customer subscribes to your blog, leaves testimonials on blog posts and shares their comment on social media with the people who are connected with them.
2. A person finds you from a google search, downloads your whitepaper and shares it with their boss, who happens to know you already from a previous employer. They hire you.
3. You send an email to your list of trusted contacts and 20 of them decide to forward it to other people. 1 of the people who receives it eventually becomes a client.
4. You blog about a local networking event and then share it with the people you met there, as well as the organizers. Some of them subscribe to your blog and the organizer invites you to join a private dinner with all of their event sponsors. 
5. You see a friend ask a question on Linkedin Answers and you leave a link to a relevant blog post written by someone who has helped you with the same problem. They hire that person and both thank you for making the connection.

All of these things have happened to me or to someone else I know who has successfully combined inbound marketing with business networking.

As a final thought, I'll share some data. As I shared in a post a few weeks ago, I had stopped blogging a few years ago. In the meanwhile, I've been very busy. We've signed up 900 marketing agencies as customers and partners of HubSpot. The only online activities I've been involved with personally are my twitter account and occasionally posting to the HubSpot Partners forum. When I relaunched my blog, I leveraged those two things to drive traffic. In the graph below, you can see the impact that social media can have when combined with a blog when combined with my real world connections.

And I'm just getting [re]started. Once my inbound networking group for inbound marketing agencies is up and active, we'll be showing the power of real world networking combined with inbound marketing.

How have you combined inbound marketing with business networking?

I just published a post about the two different types of inbound networking groups. I am forming one that is like the second type: Businesses that sell the same thing, but don't really compete.

I plan to launch a group that only inbound marketing agencies can join. The goal will be to create an international organization of inbound marketing agencies that work together to promote the concept of inbound marketing and inbound networking by helping each other generate more visibility for each other's content. 

As HubSpot has built the inbound marketing movement together with our agency partners, I've been amazed at how collaborative our partners have been; how willing they are to share advice; how often they share each other's content with their own audiences; how often they outsource business to each other. They occasionally compete to win clients, as many of them work beyond their geographic territory and have a fairly broad service offering. But, they still work closely together to help each other. For example, PR 20/20 wrote a book about how they built their agency. I just got a sneak peak of Kuno Creative's secrets to success, which they'll share at Inbound 2012. The agencies that help their peers, find that they gain much more when they give.

I will personally lead this inbound networking group. There will be a small fee of $100/mo. I will use the fee to hire an editor, a chief content officer of sorts. The editor will coordinate the editorial calendar, manage submissions, edit articles and coordinate social media promotion of the content by the members. I will probably invite HubSpot's Gold and Silver partners as the first members. I will also invite anyone who gets an inbound networking group going and gets several members to join their group.

The most common question I get when I share the 'inbound networking vision' with people is, "Who will be the members of groups?"

Inbound Marketing group leaders are pulling together two different types of groups.

Type 1: Complimentary Businesses who Target the Same Persona.

For example, a group who targets HR professionals as clients could include an HR consultant, payroll company, health benefits provider, business insurance and an executive business coach. A company who targets home owners could include a general contractor, plumber, roofer, mortgage broker, home appraiser, home inspector, landscaper, heating oil delivery company and appliance retail store.

Type 2: Businesses Who Sell the Same Thing, But Don't Really Compete.

These are business who might often be competitive if they were in the same town. For example, a group of general contractors who are based in different towns, might decide to create a group website with a group blog. Instead of buying leads from ServiceMagic that are also sold to 4 competitive firms, they could build marketing assets together that help them reach a national footprint and attract high quality leads. Since they don't compete for business in each other's backyard, they would benefit from each other's effort.

Marketing agencies would be another example. While many agencies have clients beyond their geographic area, most agencies can only grow as fast as cash flow allows them and as fast as they can hire talent. So, usually the pie is bigger than any one agency can devour. Usually, it makes sense for them to collaborate on the marketing, sales and services delivery side. Other high touch services businesses often fall into this situation.

Douglas Burdett pointed me to a great article with data about why ad agency employees quit.

In a survey conducted by the 4As and Deutsch, the data "revealed 25 percent of the respondents confessed that they don’t love advertising."

This video - very entertainingly - shows how ad agency people are frustrated that they don't get to be creative anymore. Ad agency employees are frustrated that there are too many layers of decision making and too many people with opinions about their creative ideas.

The article goes on to suggest some things that agencies could do to retain employees:

1. Adopt a start-up culture
2. Put money into R&D
3. Work in smaller teams
4. Teach employees new things
5. Support side projects

What do you think? Will these things save ad agencies? If agencies adopted these things, do you think employees would continue to focus on traditional interruptive advertising? Or would they adapt their service offerings based on what consumers actually want? Would they deliver permission based inbound marketing? Would they help clients create educational content? Would they sell value first and creative second? Would they figure out how to get companies to collaborate via inbound networking?

I posted earlier that Inbound Networking groups will need to be lead by leaders with strong networking and inbound marketing skills. I detailed what steps are involved with inbound networking earlier too. (Read those articles if you want the rest of this to make sense.)

Many people are asking me, "What should members get?" and "What does the leader do?"

Based on my experience helping businesses successfully grow traffic leads and sales through inbound marketing + my experience networking - online and off - here's what I suggest. 

Inbound Networking Membership should include:

1. A profile page on the group's site for each member. This page should include a "consult request" form or a similar bottom of the funnel offer.
2. Ability to publish 1 blog post per month written by the small business. 
3. After 5 blog posts are written, a top of the funnel offer should be created, like an ebook. The ebook could contain content from the blog posts or other content written by the member.
4. Promotion of their offers and blog posts via social media and email.
5. Weekly training sessions - in person or virtually - so members can all learn inbound marketing, get to know each other, and can learn how they can best help each other attract traffic and leads.

Inbound Networking Group leaders should:

1. Run weekly meetings including:
1. Planning editorial calendars for the blog and offers.
2. Training the group on inbound marketing, networking and inbound networking.
3. Presenting results to the group on a monthly basis. 
2. Creation of profile page for each member on the group's site.
3. Light editing, approval, scheduling of blog posts to ensure quality content is published.
4. Compilation of blog posts into ebooks for each member. 
5. Creation of weekly email to promote new blog and offer content published by the group.
6. Scheduling social media promotion

Should there be multiple levels of membership for Inbound Networking Groups?

I think there is a tendency for agencies to make this more complicated than it should be. Based on our data at HubSpot, all of the activities above will be most likely to drive traffic, leads and sales. If businesses want faster or better results, they should simply increase the frequency of bloging, offer creation for lead generation, email marketing and ongoing improvement based on analytics. What we call: the four core services of inbound marketing. The pricing system that PR 20/20 and Kuno Creative have pioneered can probably be applied here; where the major difference in the packages are activity frequency. Group leaders could also just start with one level of membership and charge for more help. When starting a new group, I'd recommend keeping it simple. There's plenty of time to make pricing more complicated.

What should membership cost?

I don't want to set membership fees for group leaders. Eventually, I think some leaders will be able to charge significantly more if they build a large audience, or if they reach a difficult-to-reach-market, or if they are really great at leading groups. In the beginning, I'd like to see 100s of groups form who keep their membership fee low. I'd like to see something in the $100/mo range. That will provide a low entry fee for businesses and enough of a fee to justify the work required by the leader.

How should leaders sell this?

I'd still recommend the same process that agencies should use to sell retainers.  Very few of these small busineses have set proper sales and marketing goals or understand how inbound marketing can help them achieve those goals, and how to network effectively. So, education is required. Prospective members also need to understand that they are committing to creating content, helping their fellow members, and actively participating in training and group meetings. If leaders want a lower touch way to pull this off, HubSpot partners could  register prospective inbound networking group members as leads and then invite them to our group education process for small businesses.

What am I missing? What else needs to be in place to make this successful?