“Hey dad, I want you to UNsubscribe us from the ‘Do not call registry'”, my daughter of twelve told me the other day. “Why? Then all these salesmen will start calling us”. “Yeah, but that’s fun, I can verbally abuse them”. Hmmm if this is going to be a hobby for her generation, I presume that Inbound marketing will more easily outrun Outbound marketing than I had expected. In case you are not aware of what Inbound marketing is: it is sharing your personality and knowledge with the world, and make sure that you will be found through social media and Google. Much more effective and much less expensive than advertising and calling. Seth Godin explained it all in his presentation (click here) on a marketing congress in Amsterdam: “I am a marketer, I have money. That gives me the power to interrupt you […] But people are getting better and better at ignoring you”.
Quick dude, money
A lot of companies are switching to Inbound marketing at the moment and are putting content online, if only for the much lower cost than advertising (which comes in handy during an economic crisis). The thing that keeps surprising me is the urge of a lot of ‘inbound marketeers’ to put their content behind a ‘gate’: “You can download my whitepaper, but first you will have to hand over all your personal information, so I can tell in a second how much money I can earn from you”. Still outbound thinking then, because within 5 minutes after the download, you should be called according to the scripts.
Recently I was in a converation on LinkedIn with Bhaskar Sarma, he was surprised about what he called ‘gated content’ and the large amounts of personal information that the content owner gathers before you can enter this gate: “Dude, you will make for a very crappy first date when you ask all these things right after introductions.” According to calculations from marketing guru David Meerman Scott, ‘ungated’ content (no form) is downloaded 20-50 times more often than ‘gated’. But don’t you recognize this? You want to download a whitepaper and fill in a form, but then you think “oh no some salesman will call within five minutes and I am not interested in that”.
Frodo Wolverine?
Bhaskar also decided to only fill in nonsense in the whitepaper-forms from now on: “I am not going to get into details, but let’s just say that there are a lot of Frodo Wolverines with a funny sounding email ID living in 221B Baker Street, Atlantis in a number of customer contact databases”, and apparently a lot of people do this. He also adds that he will ‘lead the dance’: “My inbox has around 4000 unread mails. If I need something, I will mail you and ask for information. I, and most of your prospects, am not into you yet”. So be patient. And patience is not a quality of us marketeers, I noticed earlier, we find that ‘too passive’. The funny thing is that when you search for the terms ‘gated content’, which doesn’t sound very positive, that you see a lot of links of companies that can help you ‘gate’ your content. Apparently it’s a profession, a bit like marketingzoo-caretakers.
Patience in the trashcan
Actually it is very strange that we talk about Inbound marketing, but cannot find the patience to wait for the customer to approach us. The last time I looked, customers had phones that could call, and mailboxes that could mail. But even at the end of an article from Hubspot (click here) that pleaded for removing all gates around content, there was a link to a ‘free e-book’ of David Meerman Scott…but you should fill in form first…
I believe that Inbound marketing with ‘gated content’ as bait is not REAL Inbound marketing, it’s semi-inbound marketing. With REAL inbound marketing, you trust that the customer will find you when you are being transparent. That you don’t have to hunt or push. And when nobody finds you when you are being transparent, apparently you are doing something that nobody is waiting for. In that case I advise you to stop, it will prevent you from ever having my daughter on the phone.
This post is the fifth chapter of the yet to be written book (click here) about ‘REAL Inbound Marketing’. All comments are welcome!
Edwin Vlems 