Have you ever heard of Kenton J. Hetrick?
If not, youâre not the only one.
On 15 October 2006, at the Lafayette game, student conductor Kenton J. Hetrick conducted the Harvard University Band performing Richard Straussâ âAlso Sprach Zarathustraâ.
What put the event and Kenton into the made the event into the Guinness World Record book is that his conducting baton was 12.5 feet (3.81 metres) long.
And although he used an impressive tool, he didnât become a world-class conductor.
What does that tell you?
No matter how impressive your tool is, if you canât use it, itâs just as useful as a cat flap on the elephant house.
The corollary to that is Abraham Maslowsâ observationâŠ
âIf the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.â
And when it comes to inbound marketing, the world is most certainly saturated with one-trick ponies.
Nevertheless, we have to have the right tools at our disposal, otherwise we can turn even the most seemingly promising inbound marketing effort into a disaster.
But before we go into the details of the tools, we want to look atâŠ
Table of Contents
ToggleThe Division of Tools
Letâs start with a builder, like Jen. She is a general contractor friend of mine from New York. In a former life, I worked with her at a construction company.
Jen has three sets of tools.
One set is in her tool shed, one set in her tool box and one set on her tool belt.
Tools on her tool belt are the tools she uses all the time. She always has a hammer, tape measure and some other bits and bobs on her tool belt.
Tools in the tool box are the tools that she uses less frequently. For example, a circular saw, a jackhammer or a nail gun. Letâs ignore the size difference between a standard toolbox and the tools Iâve just listed.
Tools in the tool shed are the tools that she uses only once in a while. For example, a table saw, a wheelbarrow or a concrete mixer.
In your business, you have to divide your inbound marketing tools and allocate them according to how often you need them to do your work.
And now we can look intoâŠ
Inbound Marketing Tools of the Trade
Analytics Tool
This tool is for monitoring your marketing systemâs performance.
The free Google Analytics can be a good first-step tool and then later you can check out more sophisticated tools like www.crazyegg.com, www.kissmetrics.com or www.optimizely.com.
Many marketing experts agree that even after signing up with big guns like Optimizely, they keep using their Google Analytics to compare search and analytics results.
Blog Tools
You may or may not enjoy blogging, so letâs look at some numbers, hoping it piques your interest:
Hubspot reports that companies that regularly blog can garner 97% more inbound links.
According to InsideView, B2B marketers who use blogs generate 67% more sales leads than non-bloggers.
As per TrafficGenerationCafe, an extra 21-54 blog posts can increase traffic by 30%.
Hubspot again: Businesses that blog more than 20 times a month can get 5-time more traffic than those that blog less often than 4-times a month.
Ideally, you need three people for blogging: a writer, an editor and a web person.
The writer and the editor are full-time people and the editor is either a part-time or independent professional.
But even if sheâs a freelancer, she must be part of the team, so she has a good feel for the companyâs tone and style.
Later, as the company grows, she can be turned into a full-timer.
Donât try to get everything in one person because you it will be a huge disappointment.
This is a tall order, I know, but if you can get a writer who has subject matter expertise and industrial experience in the domain she has to write about, then do your best to get her.
The caveat is that youâre unlikely to get her as an employee. Specialist writers are highly sought-after, and most of them donât even consider âgainful employmentâ as an income earning possibility.
For blogging platform, we use Hubspot and have found it versatile, robust and user-friendly. Depending on the package your subscribe to, you can open or close a broad range of features.
Calendar Management Tools
This calendar can include many things, including your content calendar, your work- and meeting schedules and the milestones of the projects that youâre working on.
If youâre leading a team of professionals, itâs also important to keep an eye on how theyâre getting on with their work. No, not micromanaging them, just keeping yourself on track as to when to schedule briefing/debriefing/updating meetings with team members.
Remember, teams must be lead not managed. Talented people want to be lead; they just donât want to be managed.
CRMs
In todayâs red-hot competitive business environment, using a CRM system is not even optional.
According to SuperOffice, in 2008, only 88% of CRM solutions were in-house desktop software. Today, 87% of solutions are cloud-based, and weâre getting very close to the point that this 87% becomes very close to 100%. At last, based on the trend, this is a fair prediction.
SuperOffice also indicates that in the future, companies invest the most in CRM systems.
Knowing how important it is and how many different CRM systems there are out there, you have to be very careful with your choice.
Itâs a balance of budget and capability. With every new feature, price can increase quite significantly.
You certainly want to invest in a scalable system in which you can open new features or robustness (storage space, number of fields, number of users, etc.) as your business grows.
For instance, in , you can start on SalesforceIQ CRM Starter for $25 per month per user and go up to Lightning Unlimited for $300 per month per user.
And in case, youâre concerned about investments, here is something from the Gartner Group: CRM offers an average return of $5.60 for every $1 spent.
Hope it has helped a bit to make up your mind.
Email Marketing Systems
Target Marketing wrote that email marketing offers some $4 return on every $1 invested.
I would say thatâs pretty good.
What makes email marketing so attractive is that it costs nothing to send emails.
But there is a dark side of email marketing which have implications, such as the spam laws, especially Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation.
The good news is that you donât have to worry about the technical details because theyâre all built into systems like Hubspot, Pardot or Aweber.
While Aweber or Mailchimp donât have the sophistication of Pardot or Marketo, theyâre very reliable and inexpensive systems for new businesses.
They all that spam tools built into them, meaning that technically they are spam compliant.
So, if you send out quality content and stay away from spam-triggering words, youâre safe. The system can take care of the technical nuances, like sending to large lists in small batches and including some key elements in the body of the email.
Idea Repositories
A few years ago, I read an interesting British study about when people get their best ideas.
It turns out that the best ideas hit us while standing under the shower and while commuting to and from work.
What this means is that you need a reliable method to recording your ideas.
And you need a system that allows you to deposit your ideas into a system which you can easily retrieve it from at a later time and start developing them into full-blown intellectual property.
For me what works best is a little digital voice recorder that I carry with me everywhere and I can activate with one push of one button.
Yes, smartphones can record to but to get them started is a fiddly process for me and I canât do it with one hand. And definitely not in 3-5 seconds.
But if youâre an experienced smartphone user, this is not a problem. It is for me, because Iâve been a mobile phone user only since December 2014, so Iâm very inexperienced.
Then when I go home, I connect the recorder to the computer, download the recorded files and can listen to and transcribe them.
I user EverNote as my idea repository. Some notes are only for me, but some I want to share with others. EverNote is perfect for that.
I use the desktop version of EverNote and the computer synchronizes the desktop with the cloud version.
Besides the voice recorder, I also carry some index cards to take written notes.
To learn more about EverNote and how to use it as an effective productivity tool, Visit Steve Dotto, a Vancouver-based IT consultantâs website and you find several tutorials on EverNote. As a bonus, Steve has a brilliant presentation style too.
Hubspot also has a blog post on how to use Evernote to dictate your notes.
Marketing Automation Tools
Letâs start with the definition because otherwise some other tools can be misleading.
A marketing automation system will usually include a full suite tools like email marketing system, social media platform, blogging and other tools. Itâs an integrated version of several separate tools.
And while they can do a lot, especially for new businesses, it can be a bit of an overkill. Hubspot, Pardot, and Marketo are great tools, but new businesses donât need to start there. Take time to review the plethora of new marketing automation platforms on the market to learn what works for you and your business growth.
But the other side of the same coin is that youâd better choose a system that can serve your business for a few years to come. Otherwise you spend your life migrating data from one system to the next.
Want more inbound marketing tool tips? Click here for our second article in the inbound marketing tools of the trade series.