Marketing à la Hubspot – it’s like dating

‘Attract.  Engage.  Delight.’

It’s called inbound marketing and the principles are simple, intuitive, and as conceived and executed by Hubspot, notably game-changing.   Spawned at MIT in 2006, with a cool west coast vibe, Hubspot is a company and a software product, it’s both.  The central takeaway is ‘publish your way in’.  Not with blanket email campaigns, ads, or phone calls – that’s ‘outbound’, an annoyance and ignored for the most part.

Instead:

1. Attract. Publish compelling content – write, educate, be of service.  Your vehicles include your website, blog, video and social media.
2. Engage. Listen very carefully to your prospective clients.  This is key.  What is the problem that needs to be solved? Think, be creative, have a dialogue.
3. Delight.  Offer a solution.  One size does not fit all – cater to your clients’ needs and desires now that you know what they are.
4. Everybody’s happy.  You have happy clients and happiness is contagious.

There are nuts and bolts, of course, powerful online tools for content management, web analytics, SEO and more –  all fodder for another blog post.  But this is not about that, it’s about Hubspot’s philosophy – valuable content, a targeted approach, a personalized solution.