What do you do when you’re having trouble explaining a concept to a friend? You use an analogy. Something you can both relate to that gets the point across. Hollywood does this all the time; someone pitches Battlestar Galactica to a producer by calling it “Trip to Bountiful meets iRobot.”
If, in the ongoing saga of inbound marketing, you are trying to explain inbound marketing all without causing everyone’s eyes to roll back in their heads, it might be good to have a few ideas handy for relating the various components of inbound marketing to a more familiar idea.
It’s time to come up with some analogies to sell inbound to your company.
Defining Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing, aka interruption marketing, can be easily explained by comparing it to two things:
- Telemarketers
- TV Commercials
Everybody can relate to the phone ringing right as you sit down to dinner. You answer to find out it is someone trying to sell you a timeshare in Minot. And you can’t politely get off the phone because this person just won’t shut up.
What happens? You hang up on them and vow to never buy anything from that company.
As for TV commercials, aren’t those just excuses to get up for a snack or to use the bathroom? Or, worse yet, change the channel to some other show? In either case, the commercial is worthless because you didn’t see it.
If you need more ammunition, mention pop-up ads; video ads that start talking as soon as you land on a webpage; and banners that flash purple, green, and orange across the top of the screen.
Telling the Story of Inbound Marketing
Now you can say you have a much less intrusive way to get the word out about the company and its products and services without irritating the heck out of everyone. Depending on your audience, inbound marketing can be like fishing or dating.
In both cases you are hoping to attract someone or something to come to you. You don’t make a lot of noise because then they will just run or swim away. You stand still and offer something noticeable and enticing to draw the prospect to you – bait, flowers, chocolates…whatever works.
Once attracted you hook them and reel them in. Or propose and offer a ring. Up to you.
Inbound Marketing Building Blocks
Here are some easy to use analogies for some of the components of inbound marketing that can provide a short cut to understanding.
1) Keyword Strategy: College Applications
Applying to college means determining reach, target and “safety” schools. Keywords are much the same way.
- Safety - Generally speaking, you can easily rank for long-tail keywords.
- Reach - These are the keywords you would love to rank for but that are very highly competitive. These may be industry keywords like “content marketing.” Don’t spend too much trying to get there.
- Target - These are the keywords worth the extra effort. They may not be easy to rank for but not impossible and they will bring in the highest ROI. You have a reasonable expectation of doing so.
2) Conversion Path: Catch and Release
Your Call-to-Action (CTA) is the bright, catchy bait for luring a prospect to your Landing Page. Once there, the Landing Page is rather like a snare. You take away the navigation and make it very enticing (great copy, optimized, etc.) to leave some information such as an email address to indicate tacit permission to reach out to them again.
The Form can be thought of as a tag (as in tagging an animal with a radio transponder). This is where the prospect leaves pertinent information so you can find him again. The Thank You page is the release where the prospect can look further into your website or go somewhere else. Don’t worry, you have a way of finding him now.
3) Marketing Automation: Air Travel
If you aren’t in a hurry you can hop in your car and drive coast to coast. And you could continue to run your campaigns manually, creating separate emails for each of your customers and responding one-by-one. If you only have 10 customers you might be able to justify the time and effort.
But with marketing automation, you put jet engines on your lead generation and nurturing practices. You can cater to a list of hundreds or thousands with little effort and more accuracy. Marketing automation makes it possible to send scheduled, targeted messages with different triggers for ongoing relationship building and moving customers along the buying cycle without losing any through the cracks.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words and so is a good analogy. If you are having trouble getting your boss to understand how inbound marketing works and why, in the long run, it will cost much less money and effort, try these analogies to illustrate your story.
