How to implement self-reported attribution in HubSpot
Mar 09, 2023
If you are contemplating looking for, have started seeking or have just received seed round funding, congratulations, this is an exciting time for you and your business.
When giving funding, investors are looking for certain conditions to be met. Among them and perhaps most important is growth potential - investors like fast, high growth best of all.
When it comes to delivering that growth, investors are placing their trust in you and your product. They clearly believe that it meets a need, there is a market for it and that the business already has momentum.
Sooner or later however, their eyes, and yours, will inevitably turn to marketing and how it is performing at realising that growth.
As I often tell people that will listen, when you embark on an inbound marketing strategy, although you may not see results overnight, you begin the creation of a marketing asset. You see, unlike almost every other form of marketing, inbound marketing delivers results that accumulate over time. Or, as Tomasz Tonguz says
"Content is one of the few forms of marketing that has a compounding return."
Why? Because the products of inbound marketing are persistent. For example, blog posts drive traffic long after they are published and content offers continue to generate leads. This all produces a growing database of prospects that can be marketed to directly.
Sure, you can try to buy your way into your market, using paid search, online advertising, bought data, email blasts, PR and events as the foundation of your strategy. But all these tactics produce a here-today, gone-tomorrow marketing event, at relatively high cost. Not to mention that buyers have turned off to most of them too.
These types of activities either produce a welcome, but short-lived, spike in results, or they don’t. However, we are all equally bad at effectively factoring in marketing misfires into measurement and planning - after all, zero plus zero is still zero.
Why would you spend your hard won funding money on these types of activities before creating a marketing asset that delivers compound results year-on-year? There are plenty of excuses for not doing inbound, but there are no reasons.
"There are plenty of excuses for not doing inbound, but there are no reasons."
So, if you are going after funding, or have investors already pouring over your business, imagine what describing the compounding returns of an inbound marketing strategy to them would feel like. Now imagine what it would feel like if you had started six months to a year earlier and had already driven up traffic, leads and customer numbers, in a highly cost efficient way. Those investors are likely to be more impressed, and more reassured, than if you told them how much you plan to spend on advertising.
