After lunch I went to this rather dense, although well-presented, talk about the concept of inbound marketing made by John Heinrichs of Wayne State University. Before the days of the Internet I think there was no such thing as "inbound marketing" or if it did exist it was difficult to accomplish. Instead the primary means of marketing would now be called "outbound marketing." Outbound marketing is where there is some kind of interruption that attempts to draw your attention to a product. Television advertising, posters, and telemarketing are all outbound marketing; you are doing something (watching a program, walking, reading at home) and then someone stops you from doing that thing and presents you with something in the hopes of catching your interest.
Inbound marketing focuses instead on fitting into the flow of someone already headed in your general direction. Rather than focusing on interruption it focuses on getting permission and earning the interest of the person being marketed to. Social media, white papers, and search engine optimization are all inbound marketing techniques. You have something that is of interest to a group of people. There are other people who are competitors who have similar information and you are all competing for the attention of some target group. Your goal is to get the permission of these people to send them more information about what you can do for them, but you don't know who they are, so you do things to try and make it more likely that they will find you, find that you may have something of interest to them, and then provide a means for them to give you their information so you can give them more information. The goal is to build a trust relationship between yourself and the person who is a prospective client.
Doing all of this requires some interesting tools and techniques, and that is something I found of particular interest in this presentation. Heinrichs demonstrated a kind of relationship graph indicating where the students at his school were going for information that was created using an add-on to Excel called NodeXL as well as analytics data from the school website. He apparently uses a service called HubSpot for the lion's share of the interesting analytics data that he is able to use, with a lesser amount coming from Google Analytics.
I particularly found it interesting how he was able to determine links and layouts that were more effective by randomly presenting different versions to people as they enter the site and then using an analytics project to keep track of which links or layouts were more effective at capturing the attention of the people whose attention he was pursuing.
It was a fascinating presentation and maybe a little over my head (especially after lunch) but I'm quite glad I went.
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