Is Don Corleone Inbound Marketing in Action?
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Tue, Feb 23, 2010
Before we answer that what is Inbound Marketing? Inbound Marketing is the about generating and letting people or leads find you rather than pushing your message, products or services out to a cold unresponsive market.
Outbound marketing is focused on traditional outbound methods such as cold calls, tradeshows, etc. The principle behind this was to get in front of your cold market and warm them up to a point where they would be interested in your products and services.
At times marketing and sales can come down to numbers game by contacting "X" amount of people and a percentage of those people will be interested in your products and guess what a percentage of those people that are interested would actually making a purchase or use your services. It is a pretty simple model, get in front of enough of enough people and a percentage will buy. However this method can be inefficient and expensive, causing marketers to waste time by pushing their message to people who may have had no interest or need for what you are offering.
So Inbound Marketing is becoming increasing as the more popular choice for marketing departments and business owners as they seek more efficient and affordable ways to acquire website traffic and generate new leads.
What are these Inbound Marketing techniques, they can be broken down into blogging, social media, search engine optimization, and webinars. The principle is that pre-qualified leads find you and your company and your message is just what they are looking for.
So if Inbound Marketing was a movie what would it be? My first stop was to look at the Internet Movie Database website. Their top three movies are The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II. So I am not sure if I would view Don Corleone as inbound marketing. He has more of direct approach than anything else. Would you view "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse." as Inbound marketing, maybe not.
So what would be a good Inbound Marketing Movie? Before I answer that my version of an Outbound Marketing movie would be the Minority Report. Every time Tom Cruise enters a shop or passes a billboard the adverts or products are pushed. Yes, they are personalized but it still traditional outbound marketing at it best.
And my Inbound Marketing movie, that would be Ferris Bueller's Day Off. If you recall right at the end when Ferris's sister (Jennifer Grey) is in the Police station sitting beside a boy (Charlie Sheen) explaining everything that is going wrong. His first response is that she should talk to Ferris Buller (Matthew Broderick). And that is Inbound Marketing and Social Media in action.
So how did Ferris build up this reputation? This Thursday we are running a webinar on "How to Build a Brand with Social Media", so you too can sing in Village Halloween Parade!