Instead of focusing on the “old school” outbound marketing strategies, HubSpot is a somewhat unique company that uses a variety of inbound marketing techniques to reach various customers. Small businesses pay an initial startup fee along with a monthly fee to use the inbound marketing tools that HubSpot has to offer.
HubSpot states that the rules of marking have changed. In my opinion there has always been inbound and outbound marketing. For example; since the age of the caveman people have communicated to their family and friends what works well and what doesn’t. The round wheel rolls nicely and it sucks to burn wet wood, thus the caveman entrepreneur that had the round wheel and dry firewood store made lots of money (or animal skin… whatever they traded). This is inbound marketing at its earliest. The entrepreneur caveman soon put a sign on his store, handed out some flyers and voila, outbound marketing was born.
I would tend agree with HubSpot, the rules of marketing have changed. Today consumers are their own researcher, sales person, and purchaser. The internet has changed the strategy and way people buy things. Inbound marketing in the 80’s made up about 10% of the total marketing effort (yellow pages in the phonebook, etc). Today people have the internet – the game has changed. Outbound marketing has dwindled and inbound marketing now makes up more than 50% of the total marketing effort (my personal ecommerce observations and experience leads me to this conclusion).
Inbound marketing in not the “end all, be all” answer. Outbound marketing still has its place and will remain to be an important piece of the marketing puzzle (at least if you want effective results). HubSpot is currently practicing what it preaches and they only use inbound marketing to attract their customers. I disagree with this tactic. If I were on the board I would show data how inbound marketing is necessary and has increased over the past 20 years, but I would also maintain a strong outbound marketing effort. Let the people decide and I guarantee that HubSpot have a steady flow of customers and potential customers. If HubSpot uses a little outbound marketing it will not drive customers away – I think it’s asinine that HubSpot thinks so.
In a nut shell, HubSpot didn’t do much more than integrate a bunch of different inbound marketing tools together that spit out fancy graphs, reports and make data driven suggestions. Maybe I should create a business that integrates a plethora of inbound and outbound marking tools and call it MarketMark…
