Just a few days after the Technology Marketing Alliance(on whose board I sit) hosted HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan for an evening of Inbound Marketing evangelism (When Marketing Dinosaurs Roamed the Earth: An Evening with HubSpot’s Brian Halligan), the TMA had another thought-provoking event: A panel of CIOs discussing what kind of information they consider in making purchase decisions.

The event, What Tech Buyers Want from Marketing, was notable for the candor of the panelists, which included senior executives with the Carlyle Group and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (Janelia Farm)  as well as a serial tech entrepreneur.

While Halligan emphasized the importance of publishing content to “get found” online, it may be no surprise that the CIO panelists’ leading source of information, by far, was the experiences and opinions of peers.  This channel of dialogue is so critical that in some cases they have established informal private industry peer groups (on their own–no sponsors, no media, no tweeting).

Farther down their spectrum of trusted, useful information were blogs and social media channels.  The perception is that, while there may be useful needles in these digital haystacks, most of the information has to be taken with a giant grain of salt due to the (mostly) biased sources.

So how does this feedback square with the Halligan/HubSpot/Inbound Marketing approach, which says you should focus the vast majority of your resources on publishing content that gets you found online.  What if your site gets found but it isn’t considered a trusted source by the seekers?  Is it worth the significant investment on content development and publishing?

The beauty of this dichotomy is that both approaches hinge on the most important part of the marketing mix: having an outstanding product or service (that’s right, “product” is one of 4 P’s of marketing).  Understanding the market and delivering an outstanding customer experience will then:

Cause peers to generate positive word of mouth; and

Generate great reviews by the target audience and/or trusted advisors (independent research firms, technical reviewers, trade media), which you can publish in your site and via your social media channels to help you get found in a positive light.

So, while Inbound Marketing and peer information appear on the surface to be wildly different aspects of the purchase cycle, they have something critical in common: an outstanding positive customer experience.

Bob London is President of London, Ink, a marketing and communications consulting firm based in the Washington, DC area. He can be reached at bob@londonink.com. His business humor writing, Bobservations, can be seen at www.bob-servati ons.com and is now a monthly column in SmartCEO DC magazine (www.smartceo.com)

HubSpot’s Brian Halligan gives marketers a good-natured slap in the face

By Bob London, President of London, Ink

Brian Halligan is CEO of HubSpot, and he has biz cred.  He’s one of the current “it guys” of the start-up world, and it’s hard to ignore his pitch after you hear how his company is crushing it.

HubSpot, an online software company that “gives (businesses) all the tools you need to make marketing that people will actually love,” has seen revenues grow more than 6,000% since 2007.  HubSpot is the second fastest growing software company on the widely admired Inc. 500 list.   The company has raised money from, among others, Google Ventures and Salesforce.com.

Last night, while in town to attend the Inc. 500 gala, Halligan spoke at an event sponsored by the Technology Marketing Alliance (on whose board I sit) and FounderCorps at the Deloitte Executive Briefing Center in Tysons Corner, Virginia.

Halligan raved about the future of marketing, and he is a stitch: at one point he bent over and mimed the act of shoveling in order to demonstrate how old school marketers (including most of the audience) are just dumping their freshly minted VC investments into a furnace—essentially renting rather than owning their own marketing assets.

What marketers should focus on, according to Halligan, is getting found.  How do you get found? Here’s his prescription:

• Have a smart web site that personalizes the experience based on the visitors.
• Create a blog and use it and your site to publish a high volume of content to drive visitors, generate inbound links and improve your SEO.
• Syndicate that content around the web to various high-traffic sites and channels (i.e. SlideShare, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).
• Use real words and thoughts instead of business-speak.
• Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.
• Hire young, hungry and cheap digital citizens.
• Measure and analyze everything and refine consistently.

Stephanie Wonderlick of SpeakerBox PR, which put together the event, encapsulated Halligan’s points in this blog post.

Woven into almost every part of his pitch is that the era of money-wasting marketing dinosaurs is over.  Marketers need to stop using the traditional marketing playbook, which includes buying lists, spamming them, cold calling your brains out and going to tradeshows.

(By the way, Halligan told us that HubSpot just spent $700,000 to sponsor Salesforce.com’s DreamForce event and that if the ROI doesn’t prove its value they will not do that again.)

In general terms, Halligan is spot on.  The typical marketing approach needs to be reinvented.  His pitch is reminiscent of the seminal 2008 New Yorker article by Ken Auletta, which chronicled the meeting between Google’s co-founders and Mel Karmazin, an old-line broadcast ad sales guy who was then CEO of Viacom.  Here’s part of their exchange:

“You buy a commercial on the Super Bowl, you’re going to pay two and a half million dollars for the spot,” Karmazin told the Google team. “I have no idea if it’s going to work. You pay your money, you take your chances.” To turn this lucrative system over to a mechanized auction posed a serious threat. “I want a salesperson in the process, taking that buyer out for drinks, getting an order he shouldn’t have gotten.”

(Larry) Page and (Sergey) Brin thought Karmazin’s method manipulated emotions and cheated advertisers. Just as egregious, it wasn’t measurable and was therefore inefficient. They were convinced that they could engineer a better system. 

Karmazin looked at his Google hosts and proclaimed, only half in jest, “You’re f@%ing with the magic!”

So Halligan and HubSpot are clearly on to something big and game-changing. The cringes and nervous laughs from last night’s audience indicates the type of old vs. new tension that usually precedes a tectonic shift.

But his evangelistic fervor seemed to suggest that the marketing dinosaurs who are doing it all wrong today have only a few short moments left on earth.  They need to evolve now.  Today.  Yesterday.  Run out and re-staff your marketing departments with fresh-faced, recently graduated digital natives who shun email, hate rules and love Wilco.  Turn them loose on the web and don’t edit them too much, if at all.  Stop wasting money on trying to find your audience; let them find you.

This is the right idea, and hopefully the companies that are buying (actually renting) HubSpot’s software will adopt Halligan’s Inbound Marketing strategies to make the software live up to its potential.  Then the world can see proof that the vision is taking place now—not in ten years.

But there is the question of timing.  How quickly will or should the marketing world evolve.  It is already unrecognizable from just five or certainly 15 years ago.  How soon and how fully will the HubSpot view of the world take hold?

As the event ended, the over-riding feeling I was left with was one of feeling refreshed.  Marketers should appreciate Halligan’s good-natured slap in the face. To dismiss his point is to risk becoming extinct—if not next year then perhaps the year after.

Bob London is President of London, Ink, a marketing and communications consulting firm based in the Washington, DC area. He can be reached at bob@londonink.com. His business humor writing, Bobservations, can be seen at www.bob-servati ons.com and is now a monthly column in SmartCEO DC magazine (www.smartceo.com)