Inbound Is Now Unbound?!?

I guess it's official, inbound, and the concept of inbound marketing is dead. In case you missed it, HubSpot, the official creator of Inbound Marketing back in the day and of its conference, Inbound, has changed the name of the conference to Unbound. Putting the final nail in the coffin for inbound marketing.

I’m sure some of you will say it’s been dead for a while, and you’re probably right, but I feel like this is a milestone.

Let me share a personal story with you.

Let’s go back in time. Inbound Marketing was created by Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan at HubSpot. Somewhere around 2008. To be clear, the tactics associated with inbound marketing weren’t new. At Square 2 (my digital agency), we were an advocate for inbound marketing tactics well before that, but they brilliantly named it, wrote a book, created a conference, all in support of their software platform, and as a result, an entire movement.

I’ll never forget reading the book and saying to myself, “We’ve been doing this for years and never knew it had a name, this is great! This might actually change how marketing is done!” To be honest, I was so excited that our agency decided to start telling clients who wanted to work with us that they had to buy HubSpot, we ONLY did inbound marketing, and the rest was history.

We quickly grew, quickly became one of HubSpot’s most successful agency partners, and I loved all of it.

Brian even evangelized the movement with the phrase, “marketing is now about the size of your brain, not the size of your wallet,” Meaning you don’t have to spend a ton of money to generate leads. There’s a way to earn attention, instead of buying it.

Back in 2008, the height of the Recession, this made so much sense to almost everyone, and HubSpot grew dramatically, our agency grew dramatically, their agency partner program grew dramatically.

If you were at an Inbound Conference between 2010 and 2019, you know what I’m talking about. HubSpot created a community around Inbound Marketing and propelled its software to hockey stick growth. But the community was amazing. It was “remarkable.”

Strategically and tactically executing inbound marketing was a motion most agencies didn’t know how to do. HubSpot taught them. I literally started a boutique consulting practice to help agencies move to inbound from traditional marketing tactics.

Everything in the world was right. Or was it?

You see, inbound marketing had a secret that most people either didn’t know or didn’t talk about. It took time, and it took patience.

It required a ton of content to earn that attention, and earning that attention took hard work, it took skill, and experience to know what content to create. It was harder, took longer than most people expected, and longer than most people wanted to wait.

Some people started early and stuck with it. HubSpot was one of them; some top agencies were others that stuck with it. They saw the results. The lead generation machine inbound marketing created was a thing of beauty. You fed the content machine, people came to your website, they converted, and leads flowed in.

But most people weren’t patient; they didn’t know what they were doing, they expected magic, and the work was too hard. To them, inbound marketing didn’t work. It wasn’t special, and over time, inbound marketing started to lose its luster.

To be fair, the marketing world started to change, too. With everyone producing massive amounts of content, it became harder and harder to feed the machine, stay ahead of your competition, and generate enough leads to justify the investment.

Google kept changing the game, and it was hard to stay ahead of these changes.

Paid advertising, like paid search, paid social, and other paid digital channels, which were NEVER a part of inbound marketing, started to be a requirement. You had to supplement what inbound was doing with outbound tactics to get results faster and satisfy management. That was a slippery slope that proved to be the first step in the end of inbound marketing.

Overtime Inbound Marketing became less and less relevant, and today, the conference that championed this amazing, people-focused approach to marketing is gone. I have to admit, I’m a little sad.

I’ve been a professional marketer for my entire career. That’s over 40 years now. I have to say. I hate advertising. It’s interruptive in every way. Ads on TV, radio ads, pop-up ads, paid search ads before my desired results, banner ads, all of it. I hate it all, and it’s my chosen profession.

Who wants any of their experiences to be interrupted? There’s a phrase, “marketers ruin everything.” They do, it’s accurate. Find something that people love, and marketing will find a way to clutter it, degrade it, bother you on it, and whether you like it or ask for it, the ads are always there.

Inbound Marketing was an alternative. An incredibly intelligent and carefully crafted alternative. But it wasn’t sustainable. The company that created it bailed on it, and then so did everyone else. I understand why we’re all in business to make money. We have to change with the market, with the desires of our prospects, and we have to sell them what they want to buy. I’ll never fault anyone for making decisions that go to moving their company forward.

But I wish it had been different. I wish Inbound Marketing had evolved and sustained itself as the ONLY way to market your business like I thought it might, back in 2008.

So, RIP, Inbound Marketing. I’ll miss you.