Startup Traction: Intro to the Inbound Game

So you’re heading up the growth initiatives at your company. Naturally you’re looking to expand your network, position yourself or your company as a thought-leader in your industry and get noticed by the likes of venture capital firms and angels.

You’re doing all the rights things — reaching out to your immediate LinkedIn connections asking for strategic introductions, attending weekly networking events, and continuously hammering the phone and shooting out emails.

Theres absolutely nothing wrong with the approach I just described. In fact it’s a standard outbound sales workflow.

Today I’m going to give you a pragmatic primer on the inbound game, and explain why you should highly consider it as a startup.

Are you ready to drive leads through your sales funnel?

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a term popularized by Hubspot’s Brian Halligan in recent years.

Wikipedia seems to be a logical place to fish a definition for such marketing jargon:

Inbound marketing is promoting a company through blogs, podcasts, video, eBooks, enewsletters, whitepapers, SEO, social media marketing, and other forms of content marketing which serve to attract customers

If you’ve heard of content marketing, great, because it’s fundamentally analogous.

Fundamentals of an Inbound Approach

So given the context provided by our trusted friends at Wikipedia we can safely assume that taking an inbound approach involves some sort of content curation.

In order for us to successfully deploy an inbound marketing strategy we need to have a targeted readership.

On the internet this translates to some sort of a subscriber base, which can come in several form factors such as:

1. Large e-mail list


2. Social media following


3. High-traffic blog or website

Established companies are naturally poised to take advantage of these opportunities with their fully-staffed social media departments, influx of existing website traffic, and monster e-mail lists.

But us startups have limited resources and distribution. We’re lucky if we have a 1000-person reach with our founding team’s personal social network following.

Creating Your Own Distribution Channel on Twitter

WARNING: DO NOT CONTINUE READING IF YOU’RE NOT PREPARED TO GET YOUR MIND BLOWN.

Twitter’s future is a hot topic of discussion, and many people have their opinions.

But one thing is for certain, it has some interesting characteristics that play in our favor given our current lack of distribution.

It turns out that Twitter is an extremely effective platform to rapidly grow a subscriber base. You just need to be given some instruction on how to do it.

To paraphrase the linked article, you should follow people who share common interests with you. The reason is because by initiating the follow, you are in-fact setting off a reciprocity trigger, that happens to get satisfied 15–20% of the time. Okay, enough psychology jargon … in plain english, people who you follow will follow back (15–20% of the time), thereby assuming the fundamental role of subscriber to your content.

The results are truly impressive. For a month’s worth of following, depending on the degree of targeting, you can amass thousands of followers. Unfortunately the process of following relevant folks can be quite time consuming.

Since we know that a process’s value is merely a function of effort and benefit:

Forgive the stock image ☺. It perfectly conveyed the driving point visually.

We could potentially yield more value if we can simply minimize the effort exerted.

Fortunately there are folks who have already realized this opportunity, and have created several tools that we can leverage to greatly improve the efficiency of this process. I personally recommend Flutter (of which I happen to be the co-founder), but some others that provide similar functionality are ManageFlitter and Tweepi.

Distribution is Only Half of the Story

Building yourself a distribution channel is truly powerful but would presumably be rendered useless without content.

It’s like having a gun without bullets. Or even more appropriate, like a grenade launcher without grenades.

It’s important to have the distribution channel, but it is dually important to constantly be pushing high-quality content down that pipe. After all, people generally follow you because they’re genuinely compelled by your thoughts and they generally spend time on social media because they’re seeking entertainment.

So how do we become entertainers in this age where content is a commodity?

Introducing 5–3–2 Rule

Pioneered by T.A. McCann, the 5–3–2 Rule is a social media sharing ratio that says:

• Five of your shares should be repurposed content from others, relevant to your audience


• Three of your shares should be original content, relevant to your audience (but not directly selling your products)


• Two of your shares should be personal, to keep help humanize yourself or your brand

The ratio has proven to be a healthy one, but the big take-away for me was that it’s totally acceptable and even advised to repurpose content. More shockingly, it’s acceptable to publish repurposed content at the same cadence as your original content.

Folks retweet my repurposed content more often than they do my original content. This just surfaces the fact that I need to step my game up ☺.

Relevant Repurposed Content

While you could Google and do the digging for content yourself, it wouldn’t be 2014 if there wasn’t an emergence of tools that expedited the process.

The tools of the social age:

1. Swayy — My friends at Swayy have come up with a super intelligent recommendation engine that analyzes your following and interests and spits out a never-ending list of vetted content.


2. Buffer — Buffer started out as an awesome tool to schedule your tweets at peak times (when your following is most active), but recently added a great recommendation engine as well.


3. BuzzSumo — BuzzSumo is basically a socially-aware Google search. Very useful for searching for extremely socially-prominent content.

Convert Repurposed Content Into Traffic

Mind still not blown? Okay, well get ready for this.

The third leg of the inbound strategy is what I call: Content Labeling.

It’s important to keep your audience entertained, but don’t forget your end-goal is to drive leads through your conversion funnel.

Introducing Sniply

Simply put Sniply is … revolutionary for the social web. It allows you to slap a call-to-action on your repurposed content, thereby rendering every piece of content a lead generation opportunity.

This is still something that I’m actively testing & optimizing from a copy perspective. But I’m currently yielding a 15% mean CTR.

So Lets Review What We’ve Learned

• Building yourself a distribution channel can he hard work, but with Twitter and a Follow management tool it can become much easier.


• A distribution channel without meaningful content is as useful as a grenade launcher without grenades.


• Writing your own content is great, but you should repurpose existing content thats relevant to your audience. Remember the 5–3–2 rule.


• There are tools that can greatly help with repurposing content such as Swayy, Buffer, and BuzzSumo.


• You should label all of your repurposed content. Don’t miss an opportunity to drive traffic to your website.


• Keep your ultimate goal of driving leads through your conversion/sales funnel top of mind.

Let’s continue the conversation.

Startup Traction: Intro to the Inbound Game