The headlines this week are filled with news of revolutionary change.
There’s a lot to learn from what happened in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. But that revolution is overshadowing a number of other movements, including several that made the outcome of the presidential race possible.
So this is not a political blog post. No sides will be taken. In fact, very shortly, I’ll stop saying anything about the election.
This week marks the fifth anniversary of Inbound, the annual gathering of marketers (and now sales professionals) who understand that it’s critical to engage with stakeholders when they want to learn more about what you do, rather than bombard them with content they don’t want, when they don’t want it. This movement, started when HubSpot cofounders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah wrote the book, Inbound Marketing, has reshaped marketing in the 21st century.
If anything, this is a critical learning from Donald J. Trump’s success (to read more about that, check out this excellent blog post from David Meerman Scott). Whatever else he did to win, and whatever else he will do as president, Trump understood how to connect with his audience.
The tools that Trump employed – and how he employed them – are emblematic of the revolution in marketing that’s been going on for more than a decade. It’s about social media but it’s about so much more than that. It is for certain about the destruction of the conventional wisdom, which in this case, means traditional advertising.
Or as HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan put it in his keynote at Inbound this week, “The ad business is at the precipice of a monumental change that you need to take advantage of…we’re at the very top of the first inning of a new idea called pay per lead. …This is the next major shift that all of your buyers are going to be using in the next several years.”
At the forefront of this movement for the last ten years has been HubSpot. As evidence that inbound marketing (and now inbound sales) is hardly a fad, more than 19,000 people from 92 countries converged on Boston this week for Inbound 2016.
HubSpot is again, at the forefront of a new concept in online marketing that will bring organic content marketing and paid marketing together: Paid, Automated, Self-Service and End-to-End or PASE (not to be confused with PESO, a strategy that we believe in at WordWrite and have blogged about here). HubSpot is driving its tools in this direction and is announcing a slew of new features to its platform this week that will drive this.
What does this mean for all of us? Once again, HubSpot has some insights to share. Learn more by downloading the new State of Inbound report for 2016.
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Paul Furiga is president and CEO of WordWrite Communications. You can find him on Twitter @paulfuriga. 
