Last week, OpenView Partners, a growth stage venture capital firm in Boston, published a new piece by me entitled “Inbound Marketing Has Passed Its Expiration Date. What Now?” Please check it out.
In the piece I discuss how inbound marketing, one of the dominant marketing approaches of the last 12 years, has become inefficient for most companies. I specifically call out HubSpot and its CEO Brian Halligan who continue to evangelize for inbound like it was 2006 – when it had a lot better chance of working. Inbound has become so inefficient for HubSpot itself that in just five years their customer acquisition cost – the average cost to gain a new customer – has more than doubled.
In doing so, I was hunting elephants: going after a market leader. In his excellent memoir, Behind the Cloud, Salesforce CEO and founder Marc Benioff, describes how they aggressively, publicly, and repeatedly attacked the then-CRM market leader in very creative ways. (If you haven’t read it already, check out the book. It’s a terrific read.) It got them a lot of attention in the trade press and really differentiated them from every other CRM company. Their sales exploded.
In writing that post, of course I wanted (valid) attention. I also wanted to build awareness for my Bullseye Marketing approach which I positioned as a successor to inbound.
I chose to offer it to the OpenView Partners blog because I knew that many area business and marketing thought leaders read their posts (judging from what they had commented on and shared in the past). OpenView may not have a huge national presence, but it could help me build my brand regionally.
And it had that result. People I wanted to reach got in touch with me about the post and shared it with their connections and followers. For example, one local business leader contacted me via Twitter, said “Loved your post on Openview!”, and asked to connect on LinkedIn “for a possible future collaboration.” Sounds good to me.
Don’t be shy, or nibble around the edges. If you’re going to do competitive marketing, go after the big guys. That’s what can get you attention and results.
