Hybrid Forge

In their new book Inbound Marketing, CEO of HubSpot Brian Halligan, and CTO of Hubspot and creator of onstartups.com Dharmesh Shah spend a couple of chapters describing the need to create “remarkable” value propositions and content. Remarkable ideas and content are ones that would be unique and worthy of remarks and comments from other people. This could be the way you differentiate your products and services, blog about compelling topics, or Twitter about the things your dad says. I think this is entirely true if you want to dominate a market niche, but not everyone has a product like the iPod, expert knowledge like Guy Kawasaki, or a funny dad like Justin Halpern.

So for the other 99.999% of the website owners out there, following the advice of Brian and Dharmesh and many of the Inbound Marketing tactics they suggest will still pay in dividends. Here’s a quick look at why some of the tactics they describe are winners, even without remarkable content.

1. Content is King

OK, the best thing to do is to write a blog post that goes viral. Not everyone is that compelling. Simply generate a regular blog relating to your products and services. That gives the search engines a reason to keep crawling your site, and let’s you try new keywords and SEO tactics without changing your website. You can also experiment with video, conduct a webinar, release a whitepaper. These give people reasons to link to your site, which improves your status with the search engines.

2. Engage Your Customer Base

Brian and Dharmesh suggest using social media to essentially hang out with your customer base online and engage them through the social medium. What a great way to get some primary research done: talk directly with the people who you want as customers. Engage them with your blog, participate in discussion groups, or provide answers to their posted questions. Find every way possible to give them a voice and show them you’re listening.

3. Follow the Industry Buzz

Use tools like Google Alerts, RSS, Twitter hash searches, and email subscriptions to have relevant posts pushed to you daily. Even if you just consume the information and don’t contribute it’s a fantastic way to understand trends and attitudes in your space and to stay on top of your competitors.

4. Raise Brand Awareness

You can pay to put your banner ad on industry-related discussion sites, or you can get your logo in there for free by engaging in forum discussions and commenting on blog posts. Sure you may not get much link juice from it, but marketing is still an associative game. If people see your brand everywhere they look for information on a topic, they might seek you out directly. Just make sure what you say doesn’t damage your brand.

5. Inbound Marketing is a Virtuous Circle

Inbound marketing is about bringing together a suite of tactics that compliment one another to increase the effectiveness of the whole strategy. It goes beyond keywords, back-links, and press-releases to leverage the powerful communications capability of the Internet and social media to connect with people at a personal level. The more you connect to people online, the more you’ll be found, and the more connections you can make. It doesn’t have to be viral to be successful.

Inbound Marketing employs a number of very useful tactics to get the story of your brand deeper into the marketplace in a way that both search engines and humans can use. Having remarkable content can achieve the goals much more quickly, but you can still take advantage of these tactics to connect with customers, keep on top of industry buzz and generate brand awareness. Don’t wait for your remarkable inspiration to get started.