Some of the services I offer involve  marketing strategy consulting. I recently received certification as an inbound marketing professional from Hubspot.  If you’re scratching your head at how to use social media to promote a business, a hobby or just an idea, understanding inbound marketing will help you.  This is how I got on the right path…

I started my own online business almost 3 years ago.  Employed as an advertising account executive in the print industry at the time, I had my own ideas about how marketing is done.  It all centered around the interrupt model of marketing.  That is, getting messages out there in a setting where someone is doing something else, interrupting them with a marketing message of some type – in my case, print ads that are placed between the pages of engaging written content – and hoping to snag someone’s attention and get them to either buy something or at least make a mental note of the company brand.

My first lesson was that the Internet doesn’t quite work the same way…to an extent you can still use some of this kind of thinking but overall a pretty hefty mental shift will be required away from the older methods of constantly sending out commercial messages.  I also came along with my website a little after social media started to get a pretty good toe-hold.  In one way this was lucky, in another maybe not.

Lucky because I now don’t have just SEO (search engine optimization) as my only means of building substantial traffic to my site, not lucky in that if I’d started a lot earlier than I have I might not have had to work so hard to get a good standing in the search engines in the first place.  The times are a changin’ faster than I can type this.

Inbound marketing is a strategy with just 3 steps but each of those steps include a range of choices and a multitude of methods for implementing them that can lead to complexity beyond belief.  I got a hard lesson in each of those steps trying to market my little website on a bare minimum budget.  I permitted myself to spend no money other than what the store generates and my creativity, my own sweat equity.  I wanted to see if someone with nothing but passion and commitment could get somewhere with an online business.  The short answer is yes but you must be patient, committed and flexible.

I discovered Hubspot somewhere along the line.  They offer a great software tool for managing all of the intricacies of inbound marketing – kind of a dashboard solution for plugging in all the social media and other Internet tools that will be your unique inbound marketing formula.  I thought this was a great idea.  I also found out you can’t just pick this up and run with it.  A lot of education is involved, and I had a giant head start in coming from the marketing arena.  I rolled up my sleeves and got to work.

As a result, I have tested through their resources and received certification as one who knows the ins and outs of marketing with social media, the Internet and all its resources better than most since most haven’t been immersed to this degree. As an added bonus I can counsel others in the use of the Hubspot software to manage the process.

There’s was not the only resource I used.  I also read and studied everything I could get my hands on that had to do with social media and Internet marketing for the past 3 years.  I know all about the mistakes, the paths that don’t work, the common misconceptions because I lived them, in fact, ate, slept and breathed them in every spare moment.  I’ve spent hours in a multitude of online courses both with Hubspot and other channels.  I can tell you for absolute certain, this is not something you will learn from a few free or low cost seminars. Those are only the starting points.

Lucky you…learn from my mistakes.  Just read my blog posts, I’ll be writing all about the little things I’ve discovered and how they are working out for me.  I have found that the single biggest obstacle to overcome is your own ideas about how this stuff should work.  For those just getting on this path, the hard lesson is coming, you just don’t know it yet.  I learned it the same way   It will not be something you learn in an afternoon or even several – this will require a commitment to a shift in thinking before it yields the best results.

Dig in…right here at this blog!

Lisa Isbell, Marketing Strategy Consulting, Inbound Marketing Professional

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