Brian Halligan on Why Inbound Marketing is Critical for Startup Success

So you’re an entrepreneur (or an aspiring one). You have a vision to start a business that involves a potentially killer product and a load of ambition, and if you’re anything like my fellow HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah and I were when our idea for HubSpot was forming, you’re hopeful and extremely excited to get started. But hey – money is an issue. You’re a startup, so chances are the company bank account is nothing to brag about.
Still, you need to find a way to get your message out. You have to let people know you exist, you have to get found by prospects and most importantly – you have to do it on a tight budget. This is a proverbial problem for so many entrepreneurs, and yet many are still wasting valuable dollars on traditional, outbound marketing techniques like cold-calling, direct mail, print/TV advertisements and trade shows in order to get the word out.
For any small business looking to market its products/services, implementing marketing programs that are inexpensive yet efficient and successful in generating leads is an important part of the business strategy. For a startup, whose budget is even tighter, the emphasis that marketing programs need to be even less costly is particularly critical. In addition, the aforementioned outbound marketing methods are both too expensive and are becoming increasingly ineffective as customers use new technologies to block out the messages being pushed onto them.
Inbound marketing is a modern, more efficient marketing method. It uses the Internet to pull prospective customers in by taking advantage of blogging, social media engagement and search engine optimization (SEO). Best of all, these techniques cost nothing more than your time, and they save you money. In fact, inbound marketing-focused businesses have a 61% lower cost per lead than traditional outbound-focused businesses.
If you’re an entrepreneur, I suggest you focus on the following three inbound marketing components to help your startup get found:

Create Remarkable Content: Start creating content to attract prospects to your business. My recommendation is to start blogging. Companies that blog get 55% more website visitors than those that don’t.
Focus on SEO: Google is the number one place to get found by potential customers, and SEO make it easier for those prospects to find you. You should be optimizing your website and the content you create to maximize your ranking in search engines.
Engage in Social Media: Social media involvement will help you increase the reach of your content and draw more qualified visitors to your site.

One of the most important things you need to do as an entrepreneur is to spread your message. The great thing about being an entrepreneur today is that it’s cheaper. The “friction” in the marketplace is fundamentally lower than ever, which means good ideas can spread very naturally. If you started a company 15 years ago with a good idea, there was much more friction in the marketplace, requiring you to spend a lot of money on PR and advertising to spread the word.
Today, the success in spreading your message is a function of the width of your brain, not the width of your wallet. Instead of wasting your money on outbound methods, use your brain and spend your time on inbound marketing techniques like blogging, social media engagement and search engine optimization to generate leads and close sales. Then employ marketing analytics to evaluate and improve upon your programs, rinse and repeat. And hey, it works. After all, I was once an entrepreneur of an unknown, Little-Engine-That-Could startup, too.

Brian Halligan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Hubspot. Prior to starting HubSpot, Brian worked as a venture partner at Longworth Ventures where he worked with many small businesses helping them build scalable sales and marketing machines. Brian spent 4 years at Groove NetworksParametric Technology Corporation where he worked in a variety of sales, marketing, and channels functions for over a decade. Brian’s most interesting role at PTC was in starting the Pacific Rim organization while living in Hong Kong in 1993. Five years later, Brian was SVP of the Pacific Rim for PTC where he built an $80 million business and had 200 employees.
Brian coined the term inbound marketing and is author of a book entitled Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Blogs, and Social Media published by Wiley in October of 2009.
You can learn more about Brian on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter. If you want to meet Brian, you can do so at one of his frequent speaking engagements. He contributes articles to HubSpot’s blog that you can read, like this one.