Cut Your Marketing Budget to Zero & Still Generate Leads

In this post I interview Mike Volpe, who is the VP of Marketing at Hubspot.com. In this interview Mike shares why traditional outbound marketing is dying, how inbound marketing can increase your business and how Hubspot.com uses inbound marketing strategies to run a more sustainable business.

1.) At Hubspot you believe inbound marketing is the future of lead generation. Can you explain why outbound marketing tactics are no longer the best practice for effective lead generation campaigns?

Outbound marketing – cold calls, TV ads, email list rentals – is becoming less and less effective because people are becoming better at blocking out those channels with tools like caller ID, TiVo, and spam blockers.

When you’re looking to buy something, you go to Google and search, you ask your friends for recommendations on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. You read a few blog articles from vendors to get to know them and their philosophy more.

Inbound marketing – using search engines, blogs, social media with landing pages and analytics – allows you to attract people to your business using the tools that most people are using to research and purchase products today. Outbound marketing still works. But every day it gets more difficult and more expensive. It’s just a frustrating, dead-end experience.

2.) How is Hubspot using your company blog to connect more, increase opportunities and drive sales?

Our blog is one of our top 5 sources of leads. The articles we write are an important part of our SEO efforts because we have over 400 articles that show up for all kinds of searches. The articles are also an important part of our social media efforts because they give us interesting things to talk about. And, the blog articles are a great way to nurture leads – we have built an audience of 9,000 people that read our articles either by RSS or email. Most companies can double their overall website traffic by launching an effective blog and using SEO.

3.) I believe that Web TV is the future of social media. What made you want to start Hubspot TV and what are the benefits you have received since beginning the show?

We’re always looking for new tools to expand our company using inbound marketing. We have a website, a blog, we do SEO, we’re active in social media, we do some videos, it seemed like a video podcast was a great next step. Since we started we’ve had over 10,000 views of our shows, have hundreds of subscribers in iTunes and attract hundreds of live viewers.

4.)A lot of people still haven’t adopted the New Sales Economy mindset. What are some of the biggest mistakes you see businesses make in their marketing and lead generation campaigns?

Most companies think that it’s a sustainable strategy to pay money for each and every lead they get and not build any long term programs that will start to generate leads without paying for each and every one. At HubSpot, if you fired the entire marketing team and cut the budget down to zero, we’d still generate a couple thousand leads per month because of the presence we have built over the past couple years. At most companies if you eliminated marketing the lead flow would drop to almost zero because

5.) Why is marketing analytics so important and how does Hubspot use marketing analytics in your business?

Marketing analytics are critical because you need to know what is performing and what is not performing so you can optimize and improve your overall results. Marketing is all about testing – trying things and then killing the things that don’t work and expanding the ones that do work. You can’t do that without analytics. We use our own analytics software – the same stuff we sell to customers on our website.

Thank you Mike — great stuff as always.

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Mike is VP of Marketing at HubSpot, an Internet marketing software startup, where he leads the company’s lead generation and branding strategy through inbound marketing, including blogging, search engine optimization and social media. Since Mike joined HubSpot, the company has grown from about a dozen beta customers to over 900 customers, from 5 employees to 55 employees, and raised $17 million of venture capital in two rounds of financing.

Before HubSpot, Mike worked as Director, Marketing Operations at SolidWorks Corp. where he launched a number of inbound marketing initiatives such as SEO, PPC, blogging and podcasting. Mike is an MBA graduate of the MIT Sloan School of Management where he was awarded the Peterson Merit Scholarship and the McGovern Entrepreneurship Award. Mike received his B.A. in Economics and Government, summa cum laude, from Bowdoin College where he was awarded the Howland Memorial Football Trophy and the College Football Hall of Fame Maine Chapter Scholar Athlete Award. He is a Co-Founder and Director of the Boston Scholars Program and a former Director of the Alumni Fund at Bowdoin College.

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