As part of a session from last year’s Dreamforce, Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot shared a few observations and tips on one of his favorite subjects, inbound marketing. Halligan feels the marketing playbook of decades past may still have value in reaching older generations of consumers, but will continually struggle to be relevant for younger demographics raised on a steady diet of digital and social technologies. 

Halligan notes that “Humans, all of us, we’re getting kind of sick and tired of being marketed to and we’re getting very clever at blocking marketing out.” With that in mind, he says marketing needs to become something customers value, something that truly draws them in and enhances their brand experience.

Three Steps Toward Marketing That People Love

1. Create

The first step is to pull people in with terrific content. You create content with the goal of pulling people in from Google and other search engines, from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and from blogs and forums across the web. “Each piece of content you create is like a mini magnet that pulls in customers and prospects,” said Halligan. “When I think of your marketing departments, they should be concentration factories. You can create blog posts, videos, ebooks, webinars, any kind of content, each one of those pieces of content can last forever and pulls customers in forever.”

2. Optimize

Once you get cranking on a content creation strategy, it’s time to optimize that content. Halligan says marketers have gotten very good at search engine optimization (SEO), but good optimization also involves SMO, social media optimization. “How do I create titles for my content so it spreads virally inside Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc?” A mediocre piece of content with a brilliantly optimized title can spread like crazy according to Halligan. Mediocre pieces of content with mediocre titles, however, are dead on arrival.

3. Promote

You need to get very good at promoting your content, pushing your latest content through all of your social media presences. “If you write remarkable content that has great titles, you’ll get lots of reading from tweets, plenty of Facebook likes, and you’ll get a big community built around your company. The better your content, the more promotion you’ll get in the social media sphere.” It’s not enough to hope people stumble across your content from a search, be active across social channels and show off your latest and greatest.

From Content to Context

Creating content is great, but inbound marketing has to be about more than being found online. “What we want to do is create content to pull people into our funnel and then create context to pull people through our funnel.” notes Halligan.

He notes his Amazon.com experiences to highlight the value of creating context for your customers. “When I visit Amazon.com, they market to me Boston Red Sox books, they market to me Grateful Dead books. They really get me. I’m into the Sox, I’m a season ticket holder. I’ve been to a hundred Grateful Dead shows. I’ve never met a soul from Amazon yet they really understand me and know how I think and give me this really personalized, highly contextualized experience. This is what’s really special about that.”

Brian says this highly contextualized experience is what makes many top brands (i.e. Netflix, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Groupon) so successful. “They create these little micro segments, segments of one, that are highly personalized and they use that personalization to get us converting from leads into customers. This is what makes these guys giant companies, this massive contextualization of their websites.”

So how do they do it? The more you use these sites, the more they learn about you and the more personalized their experiences get. The more personalized these experiences get, the more valuable they become. And the more valuable they become, the more likely you are to convert into a lead or a customer. Plenty of marketers are getting good at personalizing their emails. “Very few, almost no marketers, are good at personalizing the entire interaction with the customers,” says Halligan “and this is how you get really high conversation rates like Amazon and all of those other internet-based companies.”

So how do you create inbound marketing? How do you create marketing people love? “You create compelling content, you pull people in to the top of the funnel with that content, and then you create g remarkable context by truly personalizing your emails, your web site, and the mobile experience to pull people through your funnel.