Inbound marketing is no longer a fad. How do we know this? Nate Silver has the numbers to prove it.
You know Nate Silver, the statistician/baseball geek/political prognosticator who correctly called the last two presidential elecions within a few decimal points. Oh yeah, the guy that ESPN just hired away from the New York Times at an exhorbitant salary. Yeah, him.
At Inbound 2013, the growing annual conference hosted by inbound marketing leader HubSpot, Silver provided the final morning keynote (following Seth Godin and Arianna Huffingon, who spoke the two previous days).
Silver represents the best of the mash-up between Big Data and classic storytelling. Everything he’s done has been possible because of his powerful understanding and care for massive data. And nobody would know about it or appreciate its meaning without his ability to share the story of what the data means.
HubSpot, and inbound marketing as a discipline, are a great illustration of the happy marriage of data and storytelling through marketing. The all-in-one platform that is HubSpot gives real people (not just statisticians) the data they need to communicate with the people they need to reach in a way that delivers results. Inbound marketing delivers results for people who want to engage with companies and organizations for products, services or good causes; and results for the people running these organizations.
As Silver makes clear in his new book, The Signal and the Noise, this happy marriage is not often understood by most of us real people or the lords of Big Data (and those who stand in opposition to the possibilities of Big Data).
As Silver made clear in his Inbound talk, though, this happy marriage is the promise of Big Data and its best intersection with the crazy species we call people.
It’s a phenomenal endorsement that Silver stood in front of 5,300 inbound marketers at Inbound and told them they are standing on the path to making something new and great possible for marketing, and more broadly, the rest of us who consume or use marketing.
Inbound marketing is the intersection of employing data about human behavior to connect to other humans who can help them. Inbound marketing connects people who want to connect with companies, products, services, ideas or good causes, with the organizations who provide those products, services, ideas or causes. It’s a very human connection that is made better by data. HubSpot calls it creating marketing that people love. If there’s no crying in baseball, as Tom Hanks’ character said in the movie A League of Their Own, then there’s no spamming in inbound marketing.
Inbound marketing is all about finding the relevant data of human behavior on the internet and connecting it to powerful storytelling through marketing to make the ultimate in human connections, the kind in which the person seeking something, and the person who has that something, come away from their interaction pleased — and probably looking forward to their next interaction.
This powerful connection between what people need or want and the ability to appropriately connect them is what first led us at WordWrite to see how inbound marketing was a natural extension of our fundamental belief in masterful storytelling to deliver business results.
It’s why my colleague Emma Walter and I spent the last several days in Boston at Inbound. And it’s why we’re excited to be working with our clients to help them benefit from this marriage of data, peoople and marketing.
in the coming days, we’ll be sharing more on our blog about all the great announcements of new HubSpot features to improve inbound marketing. In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about how to employ inbound marketing to deliver results for you and the people you most need to reach, download our guide to inbound marketing here.
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Paul Furiga is president and CEO of WordWrite Communications. You can find him on Twitter @paulfuriga.
