INBOUND 2016: Mark Organ - "Advocate-Driven Inbound"

Awesome fact. How's Friday afternoon? This is great. How's the show been for you? Yeah, it's really good. I mean, this is great. It's like a true category event. Real pleasure to be here. For those of you that were interested in category creation, I know that was in the title and that was kind of changed on me. I'm still going to weave that into my talk. But we are going to talk about Advocate Driven Inbound, how to cut through the noise of advocacy. But as it turns out, that's really important if you want to create a category too. So hopefully we're all here in the right place. A little bit about me. So I'm a serial entrepreneur. I started when I was about nine years old selling pills from my parents medicine cabinet. Then selling videotapes of questionable taste when I was 12 or 13. My but I'm more well known for company actually competes in the same general space as HubSpot as the host of this conference called Eloqua. Eloqua is a marketing automation software company. And now that's part of Larry Ellison's empire there at Oracle. Today I run a company called Influitive. At Influitive, we help companies build a movement around their brand, around their product, around our company by mobilizing their advocates. That's what we do today. We've got a bunch of customers, raise a bunch of money. I'm here from Toronto and that is going to come up later on in this discussion. Yeah, we have Torontonians in the house. Okay. And Affluitive, like I said, we're big, big fans of Inbound marketing and Affluetive. We produce a ton of content. Okay. We write lots of blog posts. Six blog posts a week, two to three ebooks a month. We're really, really big fans of this idea. Love the idea of being true thought leaders and being able to teach and building that sense of trust by creating all this great material. But I'm going to talk about and how to take inbound marketing to the next level. But first, we like to have fun. And it's because it's the end of a long week. It's because we had this tough election, all this kind of stuff. We're going to play a quick game. We're going to have some fun. Here we go. So who in the room is a homeowner? Is anybody here on house? Great. Okay. All the people who are homeowners, I want you to stand up. Congratulations for owing lots of money to the bank. And I assume that a lot of you when you went to buy your house, or if you sold your house, you did it with a real estate professional, is that right? Probably. Probably didn't do it yourself. Okay, so who here. If you found your real estate agent through an ad, then you get. Sit down. Not too many of you. All right? For those of you that actually got engaged with the realtor because of some content that you read, they produced. Yeah, a little more. Right? Some people, some realtors start to do that. For those of you who found your realtor because of a peer that recommended it, okay. All the rest of you can give each other a high five or something. All right? But, yeah, so that's the thing. Most people, right, they find products and services that they need through their social network, right? Through their. Through their peers. And that's because today, in the age of the social web, it's never been easier, faster, cheaper, less risky to be able to find what you need through the social network. And that is dramatically changing the way that works. Human content. We'll talk about that. So what are we here looking for as marketers? Got a lot of marketers that are here. Yeah. What are you trying to do? Right? What's your goal? What's your objective? What are you trying to do every day? These are the kinds of things that I'm really interested, number one, trying to figure out a way to better engage with customers. How can I better connect with them individually? So build a real relationship, but do that at scale. How do I get more where my buyers are, wherever they are, whether they're on mobile, whether they're international, how do we be where our buyers are and how to cut through all that noise that's out there these days? So that's one of the things that really I'm obsessed with. And so of course, we turn to technology. Technology's gonna save us, right? We're gonna look at new technology and new media. And of course, it seems like there's something new that's kept happening, like, every other year, right? So, like, Dharmesh is all fired up about chatbots. Chatbots are cool. But, oh, my God, there's another thing we gotta figure out. We gotta figure out these damn chatbots. So how do we think about these new media technologies that are coming up all the time, which apparently are gonna save us, and it's gonna be the kind of thing that's gonna be able to cut through the noise, be able to help us connect with people and be where all our buyers are. How do we think about that? Well, it turns out there's a guy from Toronto. No. Named Marshall McLuhan who said this really profound thing. The medium is the message. Have you heard that before? The medium is the message. I think really profound. Guy who studied media technologies back in the 70s and has really become back in vogue because of his theories and how appropriate they are. And this is a very provocative idea. And the idea here is that the medium by which you reach your audience is actually in some ways more important than that message itself. Right. The what that medium says about society is actually really, really important. You know, with every new medium, there are unintended benefits and consequences that are result of that technology. And through understanding those benefits and consequences, you can really master that new medium and better able to leverage it in order to reach your audience. Okay, so that's much of a clue in. He said another thing that was actually also really profound and that is these tools that we use, these media are actually extensions of ourselves, like the eye. The camera is the extension of the eye. It's actually an external part of it. Your hammer, the hammer is like an extension of your hand. Now, I don't know what Marshall would think about this. What is this? I think it's like a miniature version of ourselves and it's got like all of some of our best features and some of our worst features in the device. It's got a brain, it's got eyes, it's got ears. Okay, so these technologies, these mediums, actually, they're extensions of ourselves. And he had this really neat model for how to think about these new technologies he called the tetrad. I promise this is about as academic as I'm going to get. After that, we're going to have more fun. But in order to understand any new technology, you got to look at four things. Number one, what does it enhance? What does it do that's new? Two, what does it rekindle from the ancient past? Three, what does it make obsolete? And four, and most interestingly and provocatively, what does it flip into when it's pushed to its logical extreme? So let's take an example, like say radio. So what does radio do that's new from Its era in 1920s, radio came around. What did it do that's new? Well, for the first time, you're able to actually hear your spoken voices of people. Right? That was huge. That was giving a whole new dimension to a piece of content. What does it rekindle from the ancient past? Well, the ancient orators, the people in a town square that would be able to command an Audience now, all of a sudden, you could bring that into the living room. What does it make obsolete? Boring scraps of paper. Right now you've got something that's much more, much richer. And what is it flipped into when it's flipped to this logic, when it goes to this logical extreme? When there's lots of different radio stations that are all competing for your attention, right? And you've got to sort of have all this cognitive load trying to figure out, okay, what are all these people saying? Television's its logical extreme. You're like, we need another mechanism in order to truly understand it. So that's kind of how it is for radio. And you can think about this for anything, even chatbots. Let's think about it for LinkedIn. What is LinkedIn enhancement? What does it do that's new? Well, it's. Yeah, right. It's, you know, you've got basically your entire resume that's online. You've got a professional network that's online. Never been done before. What does it rekindle from the ancient past? I think it was those letters of introduction. It used to be like three or 400 years ago, if you wanted to get a job somewhere or if you wanted to go visit another country, you needed a letter from someone saying, vouching for you. This person is a good person. So it brings that back for me. What does it make obsolete? Well, the printed resume, LinkedIn page is way better. The resume is full of lies. The LinkedIn page actually is true because there's a social network that ensures that it stays true. Now, this is an interesting one. What does it flip into when pushed to its logical extreme? I don't know if we know the answer yet, because LinkedIn is still very much current technology. But what I think. So think about what if Everybody has a LinkedIn profile? Everybody's all connected, everybody's posturing about how great their work is, their job, life is. Well, I think what happens is opposed to people going out and finding jobs or people going out to find people, I think those things are going to find them, jobs are going to find you, and if you're an employer, the same thing in reverse. So I think what that's interesting is you think, well, if that's true, there's a really great opportunity for whatever comes next after LinkedIn. So I think it's actually a really powerful model to be able to predict kind of what's next. And so the revolution was televised. Marshall McLuhan actually lived in, was big in the 70s when we had the age of television. And television was a really powerful new technique for the marketer. I mean, not only did it amplify sound, but you were able to create these, like, art pieces. Think about the Mac 1984 commercial, you know, with the woman sort of swinging the hammer and throwing it and breaking the screen, right? You're able to have product placement. You're able to have, like, the name of a company on the back of soccer jerseys. So the first time you're able to get, like, sort of social proof inside of. Inside the television ad. And, you know, I think the thing that was really special about television was for a great marketer because the viewer was kind of leaning back, relaxing in her own home, sort of taking it all in. That state of mind allowed a great marketer, like, think about the Mad Men almost literally be able to program the mind of the viewer, okay? Be able to essentially tell them that they needed something they didn't actually need, okay? So very exciting medium. But then, of course, it got to its logical extreme. So many channels, so many things to watch. And you know what? People didn't want to be programmed anymore. People wanted to have control over what kinds of products and companies they had exposure to. So, of course, the things changed. And then we were nurtured. This is all partially my fault because of what I did at Eloqua, but we got nurtured and we got this great new thing around email marketing websites, and that was actually a revolution. It was a great experience for a while, right? For the viewer, for the prospect. It was a chance to really just interact with companies and products they found interesting. And you get nurtured and you get new material all the time. That was actually kind of interesting. So there was a big, big wave of innovation and real revolution around email nurturing. And we still see it today. It's still being used. I don't know how much you guys like being nurtured these days. Our email box is kind of filling up with all kinds of stuff, even things that you've subscribed to. I mean, how many are you unsubscribing? You just don't have time for it, right? There's just too much of that going on. So, of course, we ruined that, too. So then Inbound came, and, man, this is awesome. Because now another revolution. Because now companies can actually be like, real publishers and educate and build trust, right? Because we're producing stuff that people really want to read, and people really feel like there's expertise there. But what have we done, right? What have we done with. Inbound I mean, it's amazing. Three out of four marketers across the globe are now prioritizing inbound approach to marketing. This includes even our own company. We built our company and influitive, really using inbound marketing. But we're starting to see some limits to it. What happens? What does inbound marketing flip into when it goes to its logical extreme? Because marketers will always ruin your party with extremism. That's your job. That's our job. Right? We find a channel that works and we're going to go and we are going to be extreme. We're going to do that. So why don't you think about that for a bit and I'm going to tell you what I think is next. So I can't absorb any more content. And I think what you'll find from a lot of your customers, your prospects, that they can't handle anymore either. Even if you produce really good stuff, and I'm sure you guys all write really great stuff, there's a lot of people that are producing also good stuff and bad stuff. And there's just an ocean of content to wade through. And it's getting very difficult and customers are getting skeptical and overwhelmed by noise. And some data I've seen is that just by associating your name to a piece of content immediately, there's a 30% decrease in trust for that. It didn't, you know, it didn't escape my attention that this year I've not seen the word HubSpot anywhere around this conference. Notice that. Just called inbound. Interesting, isn't it? It's pretty smart. It's pretty smart marketing. And that's why it's because there is increasing distrust from the marketer because there's so much content out there. So what do we do about it? How are you guys doing at hitting your targets? Guys hitting them? Yeah, we aren't. We're close and we're actually doing some really interesting stuff. I think it's because we still do a lot of inbound marketing. A lot of CMOs I'm talking to are missing their targets, especially the ones that are dependent on inbound and even the ones that are doing outbound. HubSpot does a lot of outbound too. And I think the saturation effect is causing a real problem. A lot of CMOs are missing targets. So what do we do? So what I believe is that today the messenger is the message because of the nature of the social web. And I'll show you some really interesting data in a second. The message of our time is that we trust our immediate peers more than anybody else, and we have to find a way as marketers to mobilize the people that we care about to deliver those messages through proxies rather than directly, because people don't trust their messages directly anymore. So 92% of people trust a recommendation from a friend, family member more than anything else. Okay? So 10 years ago, they trusted recommendations from experts more than anything else. That's now changed. And I think the reason is because you have so much access to a wide variety of people who you believe you can trust that they actually have your back. That now, if you don't have a way to go and get those people that are trusted to go and deliver your message, you're gonna have a hard time. So you want to teach, right? You want to be a trusted advisor. But again, if you're just delivering it yourself, right, if it was just Brian Halligan and the whole HubSpot crew delivering these messages here at inbound and all of these speakers that are all giving you the same message, it wouldn't have the same effect. So the most important skills that I see marketers developing over the next 10 years is the ability to orchestrate other people to deliver your message for you and do it systematically. And I'm going to show you a couple ways to go do that so you don't be like this sort of slimy sales guy here on the right. So we got to adapt, right? Just like our Canadian friend here, the beaver. The way to do this is to build an advocate program in a community. You have to identify the people who are fans of your idea, right? Your movement, your product, your brand, and be able to find a way to go and activate and mobilize them. And so what is it that catalyzes the sleepy customer here on the left to be a rabid fan? So I did a whole bunch of research When I started my company. I interviewed over 800 people who I call super advocates, who do a lot of referrals and do a lot of references and just sing the praises of products and companies they like. And here's what they told me that they really appreciate and what you have to build in your advocate program. Number one, a sense of belonging is part of an exclusive tribe. Kind of feels like that a little bit at inbound, right? Feels like we're birds of a feather. That feels good. So being able to create a movement and create something that's kind of bigger than themselves, a sense of identity that they can go in and glom onto is really important. The second thing is to be able to move the meters, to be able to understand what their impact is on your sales, on your brand, to be able to give them feedback. And the third thing is to get social capital. So what you want is that as a result of their advocacy for your company, that they actually have a better life, they improve their career, they get recognition, they get rewards. And you'll find this here, you see the vip, the giant VIP room downstairs, why is that there? It's to make people feel really good and give people social capital. So that's what we want to do is we want to create these advocates over here on the right. The thing about advocates is not just happy customers. In fact, I think everyone's got a little bit of advocate in them. You can have employees that are raving fans you could have if you've got a developer platform, you can have developers, partners, shareholders and investors, even brand new customers that haven't used your product yet. There's a little bit of advocate in them and we want to try to identify that and want to try to amplify that. And one of the things I'm really most excited about in terms of advocates is that they're helpful almost everywhere in the buying process. So that same person that helps to generate a referral for you at the top of the funnel and generate some user generated content can also generate content to help move prospects along in the funnel faster. When your sales rep talks to a prospect and it's a good meeting, why not have them talk to a happy customer to move faster, close a deal. Because you've got a really happy customer providing that reference, even if you have a churn problem, right. A lot of people here in the SaaS business, where we have renewals and that sort of thing, you've got a customer that's having a hard time. If you connect them to a happy customer that's trying to do the same thing, they're much more likely to renew. So that's one of the things I think that's super exciting if you develop an advocate program in community is you can have them do so many different things. And the other cool thing we've learned is that it's really a use it or lose it thing. Like the more you use advocates and the more varied ways you use them, the more excited they are to feel like they're a part of your company and they really feel like an insider that way. So I'm going to give you a couple examples. One of the things I think that's particularly relevant for you guys here if you're content marketers is what we call the advocate driven conveyor belt of content. And we didn't invent this. Our customers have actually started to do this. And we figured out this is really interesting. And, and essentially what this is is the complete outsourcing of your content by your happy customers who give you ideas, develop the content, enrich the content and promote it. And to be able to do it in like an assembly line. That's the idea that I'm talking about. And I think it's a really big idea because you are more likely to get, first of all, content that your customers love because they're coming up with ideas for it, they're writing in their own voice. So they're going to be more appealing to other customers like that. And of course they're promoting it. So they're much more likely to cut through the noise than you are as a marketing organization. Sounds pretty cool, right? Well, let me show you how it works. So I'm going to give you two examples. One is from a really big company, which is Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and then gave you another really awesome David and Goliath story that you like. But at hpe, they have enormous content needs and believe it or not, their budget's not unlimited. And so they're playing around with this idea of, okay, how do we get more of our customer advocates creating stories? So this is what their advocate program looks like. This is what the interface is called. It's called the. I don't even know what ITOM stands for, but it's the ITOM Insiders. You'll see a bunch of different, we call challenges there. So these are things to do and there's points and badges. It's kind of a fun social community type of thing. And so this is kind of what a challenge looks like. Like, hey, you've got a voice, you want to hear it, right? So do you have any ideas for what to write about? In fact, you do the exact same thing here at HubSpot. Are there any people part of the HubStars program here? Yeah, it's awesome. Do you see the challenges? Like, hey, who should we. Yeah, who should we. Who should, who should we invite to Inbound this year? What kind of content do we need this year that we didn't have last year? So they actually use a program here to do exactly the same thing. And then you're like, ok, now we're writing a book, writing an ebook. Can you help? Here are some of the ideas that people want to write that people find interesting. Do you find any of these things appealing? And would you be willing to write an outline or be able to write story? And believe it or not, there are a lot of people who went and would write chapters. And then the cool thing is, even when a chapter was done, they often go back and say, here's a chapter for our ebook. Do you have any stories or data to really make this pop? And so other people would go and take that same chapter and go and say, yeah, here's some data and some stories sort of thing. And then there'd be other people who go and say, hey, here's this e book. Can we go and promote it? So they created this entire E book. I think it's like 60 pages. And it was not done by, like, the marketing department hardly touched it at all. It was really all done by advocates who came up with the ideas, wrote chapters, enriched them, and then promoted them. And it's pretty amazing. They have over 1,000 advocates that are active every single month that are doing these sorts of things. Over 20,000 acts of advocacy. But the coolest thing is the cost per lead is way, way lower than their typical content because again, they're not really writing it. It's written by their advocates. And so it's cheaper. And it's also more effective because it's not like corporate speak. It's authentic content that's in the voice of real customers, and it's much more appealing to other customers. So I really find this idea super exciting. We have some customers that their blog is entirely staffed by their customers. They don't really write anything. They help orchestrate it. And why would the advocates do this? Like, they're busy, they have a regular day job. Well, number one, it's kind of fun and interesting. So different from their day job. They get social capital for it. They're elevating their profile because now they're writing about things that are appealing to the industry. People are getting promoted and raises are able to find another job more easily because they have a profile, but more of it's just like they like feeling part of something. It's bigger than themselves. Some people, when they're in a regular job, they're not a hero. But for your company, they can be a hero, right? They can be the person that's really making it happen. So that's why they do it. For those people here from smaller companies like me. Love this story. It's a company called Ecobee. I don't know if you Guys have heard of Ecobee. This is a true David and Goliath story. So ecobee makes smart thermostats. Their biggest competitor is a little company called Google which bought Nest. Nest is the big player in smart thermostats. It's a small company in Toronto right down the street from us, about 150 people. But they are crushing their big competitors like Johnson Controls and Honeywell. They're leaving in the dust. Those are big companies, Fortune 500 companies and they are gaining on Google Nest really quickly. And they are not doing traditional advertising. You will never see an Ecobee ad anywhere. They're really almost entire approach is advocate centric. So they build products that they know are going to delight customers at moments of delight that spark advocacy. And then advocates are really their entire go to market strategy. This is what their program looks like. It's called the vibs. One of the things that's been huge for them are reviews. So they have something like 4,000, I think reviews that in fact I think they believe they have almost as many as Google Nest at a small fraction of the size. One thing that's really interesting, we'll put this up here, is that you see on the bottom there on the, you'll be our voice on Amazon. You see that they have 200 people that answer this particular thing and there's zero coins, zero points. So one of the things about Ecobee is they didn't want to taint their reviews, they didn't want to give any sort of reward but yet tons of people are doing reviews anyway. So they'll give points for like telling a story or shooting a video of like here's me with my thermostat, stuff like that. There's a lot of Ecobee selfies out there. People who are proud of how green and high design viral they are, they'll get points for that but not points for the reviews. But yet tons of people do it anyway. So what's interesting is that people don't actually do these things for the rewards. They really do it because they want to feel like they're part of something bigger and they really want to help ecobee succeed. And results again have been pretty amazing. And I think they're going to be the number one player. I think they're going to be, they're going to beat Google and that's because they have such a more efficient way of going to market. And if you think about it, I mean a lot of the great companies of our time, like whether it's Tesla, I mean how many Ads have you seen for Tesla? Like, none, right? They have no commission, sales reps, they don't do any traditional marketing. A lot of the best companies of our time, they are not doing traditional advertising and marketing. This is the way they're going to market, and I think this is our future is to build products that delight advocates and then to go and mobilize them. So finally, I love Inbound. Inbound is great. It's a fantastic marketing strategy, and I believe it will always have a role. In fact, that's a big part of Marshall McLuhan's ideas. These media never go away. So radio, for example, had its record year for advertising last year. So these technologies all build on each other. Email nurturing is not going away. Inbound's not going away. But the vanguard over the next 10 years is not gonna be, hey, let's see how much content we can produce. Or even, let's see how good quality content we can produce. Even that game is not gonna be a game that you're gonna be able to win. So what you need to do is figure out how to get your proxies building great content and then using them as your way to go to market, as opposed to you telling your story. And that's going to be an interesting skill set for you to develop. And if you do develop that skill set, I think you're going to be very happily employed. And I really saw that when I was at Eloqua, where demand generation went from a subculture to being front and center in a marketing department. What you're going to see is customer marketing is going to become front and center in the marketing department over the next 10 years. And so content marketing is also going to start morphing into customer marketing because the only content that people really want to see, right, honestly, is happy customer stories. So I think a lot of you guys are going to morph into customer marketing, and it's going to be very exciting. I think this is definitely a place where we want to be the winners. Create a movement, a movement around our companies bigger than ourselves. Think about Inbound. Think about this movement that's been created. Feels good, right? That's what you're going to want to do to build your category, build your company. The way to do it is to mobilize your army of advocates and make that your priority. And finally, so getting away from selfish marketing or selfie marketing, hey, look at me, right? Companies talking about themselves, pushing products, a small handful of go to references towards customers that are raving in public, towards building lifetime relationships. You want to have an army of advocates. You want stories for every use case for every user type that you. You have your brand. These days, it means built by customers. It's what Jeff Bezos said. Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in a room. So get them saying the right things. And finally, cut through that noise. I leverage the advocates. That's it. Thanks for your attention. Awesome.