Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

We believe that in the next decade, the effort and dollars put toward web marketing will become more sophisticated, and growth in channels like SEO, social media marketing, content creation, etc. will dwarf the growth rates of those in more traditional, interruption-based endeavors.

And then once everyone gets on this bandwagon and the market gets saturated, we'll switch back over to interruption marketing.

I'm a firm believer in the power of inbound marketing, but for all of those things painted in blue[1] there's always a campaign in red to drive my attention to it. True inbound marketing is way too risky at scale.

The next decade and the next century is going to be the ultimate battle for people's attention.

[1] - http://d2v4zi8pl64nxt.cloudfront.net/goodbye-seomoz-hello-mo...

"True inbound marketing is way too risky at scale."

In what way is it risky? I can see it being too much work for some people/companies who do mediocre work to begin with. But I can't see what risks are inherent in establishing yourself (or your company) as a thought leader in your field.

There is a risk in that the money spent on becoming a thought leader could have been better spent on ads, in terms of ROI.

I'm a bit biased (friend of Rand, founder of HubSpot), but I think the exact opposite is true.

Long-term, I think inbound marketing is way less risky for one simple reason: We're living in an age of increasing choice and increasing transparency. As buysers/consumers, we're naturally going to lean increasingly towards companies that deliver a better product/experience -- not towards those that happen to place more frequent ads. Those that build their brand by delighting customers (all the way through the process from marketing to sales to service) will find that their investments create greater returns.

But, as I said, I'm biased (but that doesn't necessarily make me wrong).

By scale, I mean big companies. Inbound marketing does scale, but it's risky at scale.

See my point about the fact that for every inbound marketing campaign there is always an equal interruption marketing plan assigned to it. Want to write blogs every week? Great! But you need to spam it through distribution channels (twitter, facebbok, email campaigns, PPC, etc)

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