How Inbound Marketing Is Rapidly Changing

(marching drum music)
- Yes, SEO's becoming harder.
Social media is becoming harder.
Some of the channels are declining.
Emails aren't as effective as they were before.
It doesn't matter what it is.
Whether it's inbound or outbound,
you spend $1, can you make more?
(air whooshing)
(marching drum music continues)
- How inbound marketing is changing
but also what you can do to counteract that
and what channels are worthy of pursuing.
And we'll talk about that a little more, but Neil,
you have any thoughts on this?
- Yes, SEO's becoming harder.
Social media is becoming harder.
Some of the channels are declining.
Emails aren't as effective as they were before.
That happens with all marketing channels,
including television advertising,
including, you know, running pay-per-click ads.
It doesn't matter what it is.
The more competitive something gets,
the harder it's going to become to produce the same ROI.
That's just normal.
But if companies spend more resources
on things like conversation optimization,
which is not a sexy topic,
and every time we talk about it or I blog about it,
I've seen very few people want to read about it,
but some of those things solve a lot of the problems.
And what we look at is,
inbound is less effective than before.
because we're still seeing a lot of companies generate
a massive ROI.
If they weren't, we wouldn't be in business.
I look at marketing as a little bit different.
Whether it's inbound or outbound,
it's really simple for me.
You spend $1, whether $1 is in ad money or in time,
it doesn't matter, but you spend $1, can you make more?
And as long as you can make more than what you're spending,
spend as much as you can as long as it's profitable.
And for me, it really is that black and white.
The part that's really changing, though,
is, one, companies are leveraging multichannel
when they need to be leveraging omnichannel.
We're seeing refins go down
when you leverage omnichannel
and create congruent experiences.
Nike, Disney, they all do a great job of this.
A lot of brands do not, but check them out
if you want to end up seeing.
Timberland uses near-field technology
to make the in-store experiences amazing.
You should check them out as well.
That's the first big change that we're seeing.
The second big change that we're seeing is
people are doing the same thing that everyone else is doing
and it's not causing a great ROI,
but the companies who are getting creative,
whether it's not doing influencer marketing
like everyone else but doing a partnership
with a influencer like Ryan Reynolds
and giving them equity in the business,
making them part of the founding team,
and having them really push the business.
And look what happened with Mint or MNTN.
You know, those are all great examples
of getting creative and doing really well
in super competitive markets.
So those are the two big changes that we're seeing.
If I had to list out a third one,
companies are using AI to become way more efficient,
which is allowing them to squeeze out more margins,
which is allowing them to get a much better ROI
from their inbound marketing as well.
- Neil just mentioned the omnichannel approach.
And so instead of just relying on SEO,
you can look at where organic reach is strong right now.
So organic reach is strong on LinkedIn.
Organic reach is pretty good on Twitter.
And organic reach is pretty good on Shorts.
You just got to decide A,
what are you comfortable with,
where your audience is hanging out,
and don't try to do everything under the sun.
I'm just saying that inbound marketing in its old form
maybe five to 10 years ago, how it used to be understood,
it's rapidly changing and a definition
can't just be content marketing SEO anymore.
It has to evolve a little more.
- [Neil] Now, if you have any questions,
leave a comment below.
I'm here to answer them and help you out.
If you enjoyed the video, like it, share it,
tell people about it.
Thank you very much.