Marketing In A Recession – HubSpot Webinar Insights

I attended a webinar on Marketing In A Recession by the Hubspot team of Mike Volpe and Ellie Mirman. Their solution? Inbound marketing. Not surprising given their business–but many nuggets of gold within.

The challenges of the current economy–marketing budgets being slashed, longer and less successful sales cycles–present opportunities to use our brains (rather than our budgets) to generate less expensive and more qualified leads.

Or, as they put it:

Examples of inbound marketing:

• Blogs
• SEO
• Social Media

Particular ideas that struck me:

• Promote flattering content. It’s not enough to just create content. When someone relevant writes flattering content about you, promote their review.
• Participate in Q&A’s on sites like Yahoo! Answers, Facebook, LinkedIn. Offer short, thoughtful answers. Offer relevant links. Try to be the first reply. Be the expert that people need.
• 75% of SEO comes from off your site. Incoming links are crucial. Incoming links from trusted sources are the best (eg, you want CNN linking to you).
• 25% of SEO comes from what’s on your site. Tips: Use only five keywords in your meta keywords, and use keywords for your images’ alt text.
• Start a Group on LinkedIn or Facebook. Use a generic title. Invite employees, customers, friends to seed it. Start discussions. Offer targeted, quality content.
• Create a social media scorecard. Keep track of how you’re doing versus the competition using a tool such as their (free) Website Grader.

One of the most interesting ideas came toward the end when a participant asked, “What’s the best way to manage your time in social media?” Essentially, divide it into thirds:

• Spend 1/3 of your time consuming the most relevant content to your field.
• Spend 1/3 of your time producing content.
• Spend 1/3 of your time promoting content.

The #1 problem most social marketers have is spending too much time chatting and not enough time consuming and producing content. Don’t fall into that trap.

Also of note: Questions during the webinar were accepted via the webinar software, and also via Twitter by appending “#hubspot” to the tweet.

Volpe and Mirman monitored Twitter for the term and responded to those questions–even as we in attendance began our own side conversations. Very interesting approach.

recession marketing | product management