At the the Inbound Marketing UK conference that I wrote about in Inbound marketing is about content and context, I was able to catch up with a couple of the speakers for interviews for the blog. The first was with Mike Volpe, the Chief Marketing Officer of Hubspot, and you can check it out here: Inbound and content marketing may make up 80% of all marketing in the future.

Following on from the interview with Mike, I was also able to catch up with David Meerman Scott, the keynote speaker at the conference and author of several books on marketing, most notably The New Rules of Marketing and PR with over 250,000 copies in print in more than 25 languages.

In the interview, we talk about inbound marketing, the impact on traditional marketing, what your inbound and traditional marketing ratio mix should be and newsjacking.

This interview makes up number thirty-eight in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things and helping create businesses that customers love.

Below are highlights from our interview:

• Marketing is about instant communications and creating content. Put those two things together and you have a winner.
• When people want to get information on something new they will do two things: 1. Use a search engine and 2. Tap their networks. If they tap their networks they will want to be sent a link, whether by email or on Twitter or Facebook or other network. Once they have that link then they are in your buying process.
• The best content wins when it comes to the search engines and also when it comes to what information and content gets shared.
• Inbound marketing competes with traditional marketing methods both in terms of budget and also the people cost of marketing.
• However, it’s not an either or proposition. Inbound marketing should be work with more traditional marketing methods like advertising and PR.
• David believes the balance in terms of time and budget should be 50:50 if not more so in favour of inbound and content marketing.
• However, we’re not there yet but the needle is shifting.
• David believes that we are in the middle of a marketing revolution. However, revolution can take a long time to manifest itself and the transition can be uncomfortable.
• Marketing has for decades been done on a company’s timetable i.e. planning a campaign or a promotion weeks and months in advance. But, now there is stuff that is happening right now and all of the time….. people on your website, news stories breaking that will affect you, your customers and your business. So, businesses need to get used to the idea of harnessing instant communications in their marketing.
• If you are a business owner or marketing executive then David suggests that there are two things that you need to consider.
  • One, you need to start to create a culture around creating content. That may mean that you are probably employing some of the wrong people in your organisation or that you are hiring the wrong agencies with the wrong skills at the moment; and
  • Two, hire journalists or those with journalistic skills onto your marketing team as they will have the right type of skills to help you create content (text, audio and video) and help you tell more real-time stories.
• Go to Google and type in newsjacking and check out the idea of inserting your ideas into a breaking news story.

About David (Taken from his website)

David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist, advisor to emerging companies, bestselling author of eight books including three international bestsellers, and a professional speaker on topics including marketing, leadership, and social media.

He is a recovering marketing VP for two U.S. publicly traded companies and was Asia marketing director for Knight-Ridder, at the time one of the world’s largest information companies. David has lived and worked in New York, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. He currently lives in the Boston area.

David serves as an advisor to emerging companies in the marketing technology category including Eloqua (successful IPO in August 2012), HubSpot, VisibleGains, Speakerfile, GutCheck, and Newstex, as well as varied nonprofits that interest him including the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz, HeadCount, and Nashaquisset. Previously, he was on the boards of directors of NewsWatch KK (successfully sold to Yahoo Japan) and Kadient (successfully merged with Sant).

You should check out David’s website here, his very popular blog: WebInkNow, his books including Newsjacking on Amazon, and connect with him on Twitter @dmscott and LinkedIn.

Thanks to surfmerchant for the image.