Ryan Smith

Ryan Smith - Inbound Marketing Master

What’s your background?

I’ve worked in digital marketing and demand gen for over 15 years before joining SaltStack.

I joined SaltStack because I knew I could make a big difference, since they didn’t have an active demand gen program yet.

Now I’m responsible for all things related to driving leads, including advertising, events, webinars, trade shows, SEO, web optimization, field marketing, you name it.

What does SaltStack do?

SaltStack helps enterprise IT professionals remotely control and secure IT servers, VMs, containers, network devices, and other IT infrastructure at scale.

We help IT teams manage and simplify their networks and cloud infrastructure with an abstraction layer, regardless of whether they’re strictly on premise, fully in the cloud, or running a hybrid cloud.

We also help SecOps teams maintain security and compliance through automated remediation and policy customization.

What’s your inbound customer journey?

Customers typically first discover SaltStack through PR and SEO, which is our most critical tool to drive awareness.

We show up on page one for terms that are extremely relevant to our business, like ‘SecOps’ and longer-tail: ‘What is SecOps?’

We also drive awareness by staying engaged in social media, particularly on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

And we actively work with our PR agency to promote home-grown research like our State of XOps report. (The report has also helped us show up on page one for the search term “XOps.”)

After we drive initial awareness, we drive ongoing engagement with prospects through a wide range of inbound marketing programs.

We use Marketo for email marketing, although the nurture/drip campaigns aren’t as effective as we’d like. So we’ve had to think of other ways to engage our community.

So we also do a lot of advertising, including retargeting tactics. We host webinars.

We’re still in the experimental stages when it comes to prospect engagement, so we generally do anything we can to move people through the inbound funnel.

To generate leads, we have a variety of gated assets like webinars, white papers, and videos.

What are your most successful inbound marketing practices?

SEO is definitely our most successful inbound marketing practice so far.

We’ve driven lots of new users to our site by getting to page one of Google search results for terms that are completely relevant to what we do, like “SecOps” and “XOps.”

That rise in website traffic has given us a chance to build awareness and drive up the volume of leads through demo signups and “contact us” conversions.

Also, playful campaigns have spread like wildfire to Reddit and Slickdeals, really spiking traffic and going viral.

For example, our Death Star Poster giveaway went viral after we published a blog post that talks about how “Todd Tarkin” was responsible for the destruction of the Death Star by leaving a thermal port open (analogous to our customer or prospects leaving a port open on their devices).

Since the Death Star Poster went viral, we’ve seen a 300% to 400% boost in organic conversions to ship a free poster.

Everyone likes free stuff and mailing a poster is a fairly cheap cost per conversion compared to other B2B options out there.

While it isn’t easy to keep a giveaway focused on our ideal customer persona (ICP), the low cost of conversion allows us to have some broader targets.

And you never know how that will play out over time. Maybe students or interns will remember SaltStack when they enter the field as IT professionals. Or maybe other marketers will share the posters for their viral nature, bringing us backlinks and social media mentions.

Another example of a playful campaign is a sticker we came up with.

We were seeing that a lot of companies were saying they remediated security issues automatically.

We found out that they were creating helpdesk tickets via advanced workflows but not actually remediating.

So we made the sticker based on the Princess Bride character Inigo Montoya. “Remediate: I do not think it means what you think it means.”

It was a huge hit!

What’s your advice for startups just beginning inbound marketing?

Be creative.

You need to strike a balance between professionalism and creativity.

Some kinds of marketing will get people to think of your brand as a serious, professional brand, like in-depth white papers. These will help you punch above your weight class.

Other kinds of marketing will connect with people on a more personal level because they’re super creative and fun.

Strike a balance between these two types of marketing.

Don’t be afraid to take a risk and be creative and fun with your marketing. But do it in a way that accentuates your more serious messaging.

What’s your advice for startups taking their inbound marketing from intermediate to advanced?

Go big.

Write an e-Book.

Produce a short film.

Book your executives as speakers on big stages at big events.

Make your customers look like heroes at industry trade shows, not just at your own conferences.

Get involved in political issues that resonate with your mission statement.

Don’t be afraid to take a stand and lose customers along the way. People want to do business with other people of character and integrity. Be loud and clear about that.

Also, put on your internal sales hat and win the executive support you need to put marketing dollars into initiatives with no expectations of a direct return on investment.

This will give you the freedom you need to engage in trial and error. Through experimentation, you can find the way to reach a more advanced level in your inbound marketing.

Where is the future of inbound marketing going?

It might be a pipe dream, but I hope that someday we can draw people in with great inbound marketing so effectively that marketers no longer feel the need to overstep their bounds on privacy issues.

I also see the future of inbound marketing moving toward community building.

The best way to sell a customer is to get them to see your products through the eyes of other customers who already love what you do.

One great way to build a community is to take the freemium model to a whole new level.

For example, our technology is based on open source.

By working with the open source community, we’ve built an unmatched camaraderie that creates countless ambassadors for our technology.

Ask yourself, “Is there anything I can give away that will enhance people’s lives for free today, but also eventually make them a customer?”

It’s true that top-of-funnel free offers can sometimes take years to convert to a paid customer. But they can also build a rich community of ambassadors who do the selling for you.

And the great thing about having built a community is that you can simply focus on creating a great experience for free users, knowing they’ll be willing to listen to you when you upsell.

For a software company, open source in particular can improve the quality of your technology up to a level you wouldn’t get without massive numbers of beta testers.

Building a community of ambassadors around an open source product also has some unique product packaging advantages.

You can look for patterns in customer behavior to learn what combinations of products and features your customers like. Then you can enhance, expand, and package the product in a way that will turn your open source project into a large community of fans and brand ambassadors.

Where can people learn more about you and your company?

Ryan Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryandanielsmith/
Website: https://www.saltstack.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaltStack
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaltStack/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/salt-stack-inc/

Amin Makhani

Amin Makhani - Inbound Marketing Master

What’s your background?

I graduated college at one of the worst possible times. It was 2008 at the height of the recession.

I wanted to work in finance as a trader, but Wall Street was hit with massive layoffs, so a new grad like me had little chance of finding that kind of job back then.

Instead I ended up landing a job at Yext.

Back then, the company was only doing about $5 million per year, but I was lucky enough to be a part of their massive growth to $120 million. Today I believe they’re doing somewhere around $400 million.

At Yext I climbed the ladder over the years. I started out managing AdWords campaigns, then became responsible for email marketing, paid social media, affiliate marketing, and some SEO. Eventually I was responsible for all of Yext’s digital marketing.

After Yext, I ended up traveling the world for about 6 months. I visited 21 countries throughout Europe, Asia, and Oceania.

Then I started my own digital marketing consultancy. And that’s how I ran into Bentobox.

At first, Bentobox was one of my clients where I worked a couple days per week. But I just fell in love with the business, and found I wanted to spend all week with them. So I ended up taking up a full-time role there.

As VP of Growth at Bentobox, I’m responsible for inbound marketing, funnel optimization, and leading lead prioritization and customer expansion.

We’re still in the early days at Bentobox, but I feel like we’ve got a great opportunity to grow the business to a truly massive scale, and much of that growth will continue to come from inbound marketing.

What does Yext do?

Yext helps small businesses get listed on hundreds of directory websites like Google Maps, Yelp, Facebook, and so on.

So if you’re a restaurant owner and want to make sure your restaurant is listed on as many websites as possible, Yext makes it easy to make sure your listing is accurate and complete on hundreds of websites without you having to spend countless hours doing it manually yourself.

What’s Yext’s inbound marketing origin story?

At Yext, we started out with a very different business model, selling leads to local businesses on a per-phone-call basis. Our main channel was outbound sales, not inbound marketing.

The problem with outbound sales was that we had very lumpy revenue. Some months were great for sales, then others were very bad. The unpredictable nature of outbound sales created a lot of risk for the business.

So, to reduce the risk of the outbound sales model, we started looking into inbound marketing as a channel.

Our first big win came with our “listing scanner” tool, which started generating a much more predictable flow of inbound leads that our sales team could follow up on.

Once we had this initial inbound marketing channel to latch onto, it was just a matter of expanding our inbound marketing from there until we were no longer as reliant on outbound sales.

What were your greatest challenges at Yext?

At first, our biggest problem was figuring out how to give local businesses something valuable enough to make them want to give us their contact information.

We found the answer to that problem when we launched our “listing scanner” tool.

This free online tool gave businesses a quick and easy way to find out if there were any errors in their online listings. They’d enter the name of their business and other vital information like phone number, address, and so on. Then the tool would scan hundreds of listings sites and find the sites where the business was either not listed at all or listed incorrectly.

Business owners were more than happy to give us their names and emails in exchange for the reports the listing scanner generated for them.

Once the listing scanner started generating contacts and leads, we knew we had solved our first major inbound marketing problem, and it was just a matter of building upon that first success.

What was Your inbound customer journey at Yext?

Many customers came to Yext through our “listing scanner” tool. At one point we were getting over 100,000 leads per month through this tool.

Most customers used the tool purely out of curiosity… just in case their business wasn’t correctly listed somewhere.

After using the tool to find bad listings, the tool would ask customers if they wanted to get their listings fixed everywhere it was wrong. Interested customers became an immediate lead for Yext’s services.

After customers used the tool, even if they didn’t immediately convert to a sale, we were still able to nurture them through email.

First the listing scanner tool would send them an email with the results of the scan. Then, we’d occasionally re-scan the listings for the company to send emails to let them know when there were changes to their listings.

These emails also gave us a chance to offer to fix any problems that the scans found. So we had a steady flow of sales leads coming from these emails long after customers first entered their information into the tool.

What were your most successful inbound marketing practices at Yext?

We had a distribution partnership set up with many business listings publishers that drove much of Yext’s early business through inbound marketing.

First, customers would go to one of the directory sites to claim their free business listing.

Then, once their listing was claimed, the directory site would ask if they wanted to make sure their business was included on hundreds of other sites, since the directory site was a distribution partner of ours.

When the customer said “yes,” they were routed to Yext to use our service to claim all their listings on all the other publisher sites we worked with.

The publishers that referred customers to us would get a commission for each sale.

What does Bentobox do?

Bentobox helps restaurants of all sizes by creating their online presence. We handle all types of restaurants from food trucks to Michelin star restaurants.

First we make sure they have a beautifully designed website, and then we make it super-easy for them to maintain the website without needing any technical skills or expensive consultants to do it for them.

Then our platform also helps them with other digital marketing features like online ordering, delivery orders, gift cards, and local SEO features.

What’s Bentobox’s inbound marketing origin story?

Bentobox was quite different from Yext. Yext had to transition from an outbound sales model to inbound marketing. But Bentobox started out on an inbound marketing model from the very beginning.

Krystle Mobayeni, the CEO and co-founder of Bentobox, started out making websites for restaurants in New York City.

So when she started Bentobox, she was able to go back to those same clients.

Then word of mouth started spreading and generating inbound leads.

After that, it was just natural to keep the inbound lead generation going. So Bentobox just continued to build upon that initial success with more and more inbound marketing.

What were your greatest challenges at Bentobox?

One big challenge for Bentobox that I didn’t face at Yext is how narrow the target market is. Yext targets all local businesses, but Bentobox serves restaurants exclusively.

A narrowly targeted market means that we run the risk of attracting low-quality leads from the wider market.

If we drive a lot of traffic from local businesses, only a small percentage of that traffic will come from restaurants, so conversion rates would be really low, and the quality of leads are also likely to suffer.

We solve this problem by making sure our inbound marketing channels are tailored to our target audience well enough that they’re not appealing to a wider market.

The great thing about having a more narrowly defined market is that we end up with much higher conversion rates than a business like Yext that have a broader market definition.

What’s your inbound customer journey at Bentobox?

We have several ways customers find Bentobox and become a customer.

First, we include a “Powered by Bentobox” link in the footer of all the restaurant websites that use our platform. So lots of restaurant owners find us when they see an attractive website for another restaurant and look in the footer to find out how they can get a website like that.

We also get a lot of word-of-mouth marketing. Lots of people in the restaurant industry all know each other, at least in their local areas. So word spreads and we get a lot of inbound leads that way.

We also get referrals from food distributors. They refer business to us because restaurants see them as a more valuable partner when they refer the restaurants to valuable resources like Bentobox. And it doesn’t hurt their reputations that they can pass a referral discount along to their restaurant clients.

Another way customers find us is through SEO. We rank #1 for “restaurant websites” and many similar search terms.

We also invest heavily in Adwords to drive inbound leads.

And of course we get some inbound leads through organic social media, too.

One interesting difference between Bentobox and Yext is the use of tools to drive inbound leads.

At Bentobox we introduced a “website grader” tool to give restaurants a report showing any problems that needed to be fixed on their websites. It’s a lot like the “listings scanner” tool we had at Yext.

But unlike Yext, where the tool drove countless leads for us in the early days, the Bentobox tool is not one of our most important inbound lead generators.

I think that’s because Yext’s business just required an approach to inbound marketing that focused on high-volume, low-conversion-rate techniques. But at Bentobox, our close rate for inbound leads is much higher, so the lower close rate we see in tools just makes the tools a less important source of inbound leads when compared to all the other ways we get higher-converting leads.

Just like Yext, we also do email lead nurturing at Bentobox. But our approach is quite different.

At Yext, we mostly sent automated reports showing businesses any new problems with their listings, and then included a call to action to use Yext to fix the problems.

But at Bentobox, we use more of a Content Marketing approach. We regularly send restaurants useful content that may have nothing to do with our solutions–topics that help them run their restaurants better or solve common business problems for restaurants. Then every now and then, we announce a new feature or service they might be interested in.

So our email nurturing at Bentobox has a softer approach with fewer hard CTAs than we had at Yext.

What are your most successful inbound marketing practices at Bentobox?

Originally the “Powered by Bentobox” links was our most successful inbound marketing practice.

But in more recent years we’ve found that all of our various channels are important and no one channel is really the primary source of our inbound business.

What’s your advice for startups just beginning their inbound marketing?

Isolate all your variables, like the audience, the offer, the UX on the landing page, the content, and so on….

Then think about each of these variables separately and write down all the options you can think of for each one. For example, what are all the different buyer personas who might make up your audience? What are all the different offers you might make?

Once you know all these variables and options, figure out what you think the best combination is. Which audience is your best bet? Which offer will be best for that audience? And so on….

Then go to market with the combination you think will work best.

As you learn which variables work and which ones don’t, be sure to pay attention to the qualitative feedback, not just quantitative.

When you’re starting out, your sample sizes are often too small, so it takes too long to get enough data to make a decision. So rely more on qualitative feedback in the early days, and shift gradually toward quantitative data when you start to get enough of it to make quick decisions and adapt quickly.

I’d also recommend not getting too caught up in visions of world domination 5 years from now. Stay focused on the goals you can conquer in the very near term first. For example, start with the lower end of the market before moving up market on your way to big enterprise accounts.

What’s your advice for startups taking their inbound marketing from intermediate to advanced?

Take a look at what’s in your funnel, figure out where you get the biggest dropoff, and try to get some home runs there.

Don’t just go for incremental improvements. Swing for the fences. Try to turn a 3% conversion rate into a 20% conversion rate.

To do that, you’ll need to take some radical swings. Don’t just fiddle with the title on a landing page. Create a completely different offer altogether with an entirely new landing page.

Where Is the future of inbound marketing going?

I think more traditional analysts like Gartner and Forrester will play less and less of an influential role in buying decisions, and may eventually go away altogether.

Instead, buyers will become influenced more by peer-driven communities than by analysts.

You’ve already seen this in consumer-facing businesses where social influencers on Instagram and other social media channels now drive a lot of buyer decisions.

I think B2B businesses are already seeing the same trend emerge, and it will continue well into the future.

Companies with customers who are very active users of their product may have a great opportunity to build communities. Then influencers will naturally emerge from those communities.

Where can people learn more about You & Bentobox?

Amin Makhani on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amin-makhani-b9764929/
Website: https://getbento.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getbento/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bentoboxnyc
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/getbentoNYC

Dennis Mink

Dennis Mink - Inbound Marketing Master

What’s your background?

I’ve always had a strong passion for marketing technology and SaaS, so I was excited to join Liftoff as the 13th person in the company and the 1st marketer. It was a great opportunity to build inbound marketing for a SaaS company from the ground up.

Back then, Liftoff was very early stage in a highly competitive space. Mobile apps were a hot space at the time.The opportunity was clearly enormous with people spending 90% of their phone time using apps. Yet the field was still new and innovative back then.

At the time, we were doing about $3 million in annual revenue. Today we’re the industry leader, doing north of $300 million in revenue, and our inbound marketing either drives or assists 85% of all new business.

What does Liftoff do?

Liftoff helps mobile app marketers acquire app users who actively engage and spend money in their apps. Our platform uses machine learning to target ads more precisely, drive more in-app purchases, optimize conversion rates, and scale against a set of KPIs.

So if you’re a marketer for a mobile app and find it challenging to organically attract new app users, or if you’ve reached the potential of Facebook, you would use Liftoff to run mobile programmatic advertising to attract high quality users to your app who convert and ultimately become paid customers. Then retarget them with re-engagement ads to keep them coming back to your app until it’s a normal habit for them. This is what Liftoff does.

What’s Liftoff’s inbound marketing origin story?

I’ve always been a huge believer in inbound marketing. I happen to think inbound marketing is relevant to every B2B tech company.

So we didn’t spend any time struggling to figure out that we wanted to take an inbound approach to marketing.

First I started out using our proprietary data as the wellspring for all our content.

Our system is sitting on a huge amount of valuable data, since we track so much data about ad campaigns, audiences, conversion rates, cost data, and so on.

So I started generating 1 report per quarter that made all sorts of useful data available to mobile marketers. I then hired a freelancer to help get media coverage for some of the more newsworthy findings in each report.

I was able to expand our content quickly by repurposing the data from the report. With the help of just a few freelancers, we used the report data to drive our social media content and webinars that talked about the results from our reports.

As we grew, we continued to leverage data from our quarterly reports into speaking engagements and a quarterly event we hosted.

Eventually we were able to hire more of a full time team to help with content creation. That’s when we were able to introduce even more types of content to drive our inbound marketing beyond the quarterly reports.

What were your greatest challenges?

Our biggest challenge in the early days was just a lack of resources, which is something I think most early-stage startups can relate to.

When I look back, it’s amazing how much content we produced with just a few freelancers with me as the only full time marketer.

The only way we could possibly have produced so much content to drive our inbound marketing was by leveraging our highly valuable data into a quarterly report and then repurposing that content in all sorts of ways.

We got tremendous leverage from that approach to content repurposing.

What’s your inbound customer journey?

We have a unique perspective on inbound marketing.

Many startups I know have a customer journey that starts off with organic search traffic from SEO. Then they drive that traffic to their website where they convert site visitors into email subscribers. Then they drive leads from a combination of email nurturing and organic site traffic.

We take a very different approach that leads to a very different inbound customer journey.

We focus more on building a community for our market. So many of our future customers discover us for the first time through word of mouth, referrals, or other means, rather than through SEO.

When a mobile marketer gets involved in our community, they can network with other mobile marketers, learn from each other, and help each other. They might attend one of our events or read about other mobile marketers featured on our Mobile Heroes microsite.

Eventually, when a mobile marketer realizes they need help, they already know and trust Liftoff, so they reach out and become an inbound lead.

We never actively promote Liftoff to the community we’ve built. Instead, all of our efforts with the community are focused on educating, entertaining, and connecting people with each other.

What makes this approach so unique is that inbound leads are generated naturally without the need for hard CTAs. We don’t “push” prospects from one stage of the inbound customer journey to the next. Instead, we cultivate a community. After establishing trust and delivering value to that community, we naturally get a warm response and high conversion rates when we offer a soft CTA, like a free consultation at the end of an event.

What are your most successful inbound marketing practices?

Our Mobile Heroes program has been enormously successful for us. This is a website where we highlight mobile marketers who have interesting stories and lessons to share with the community. Today, we typically highlight a new mobile hero every 2 weeks.

At first, Mobile Heroes was a great way for us to get the testimonials and case studies we needed as an early-stage startup.

But as time went on, Mobile Heroes started to drive many of our other content efforts. After highlighting a marketer on Mobile Heroes, we found we could easily do webinars and speaking engagements with them, too.

Now it’s a career-advancing opportunity for a mobile marketer to be featured on Mobile Heroes. Mobile marketers we feature now get raises, promotions, and speaking opportunities after we feature them on Mobile Heroes.

We’ve also found that we retain customers 3X longer when we feature them on Mobile Heroes. Now whether that’s correlation or causation, we don’t really know. But it’s an interesting observation.

So it’s a fantastic win/win for everyone.

But what really makes Mobile Heroes a key success story for us is that it represents the pivot point where content became community.

Mobile Heroes started out as a way to get more content. It’s a microsite after all.

But by keeping its focus on people, we were building relationships at the same time as we were creating content.

And ultimately, we built an entire community from those relationships.

And it’s that community that drives our inbound marketing engine today.

What’s your advice for startups just beginning their inbound marketing?

Find a way to do “extreme content repurposing” so you get the leverage you need so just 1 or 2 marketers can produce a whole marketing team’s worth of content, both in terms of quantity and quality.

What’s your advice for startups taking their inbound marketing from intermediate to advanced?

Create a high-performance content team that’s laser focused on quality.

To do this, I recommend a few core principles….

First, have just 1 “Architect.” This is the person who owns the vision for all content, guides all the decisions, and ensures the quality of all content that gets produced.

The Architect is a lot like a movie director. Everyone from the special effects department to the makeup artists and the actors are there to realize the director’s vision. Likewise, everyone producing content should be there to enable the Architect’s content vision for the company.

It’s also critically important to create a culture of learning among content creators. And you can only do this if everyone values and gives honest feedback at all times. No sugar coating to avoid hurt feelings.

Process is another key ingredient in a high-performance content team. Each person on the content team needs to know exactly how the company produces a webinar or a case study or any other form of content. And every person on the team must also know what they’re good at and what others are good at, so that everyone’s strengths are leveraged throughout the process.

One other problem you’re likely to face when you’re taking your inbound content marketing from intermediate to advanced is “content fatigue.” Creating the same type of content over and over again can get boring. And your top performers will start to underperform if they’re not challenged enough.

So, to avoid what I call “content fatigue,” I try to mix things up every 6 to 9 months. I challenge the team to do something completely different from anything they’ve done before. It forces us as a company to continually push the boundaries, but it also puts wind back in the sails of our highly creative team.

One great example of a very successful project that came out of a content fatigue challenge is our Mobile Hero Comics. This is literally a comic book about superheroes in the mobile app marketing world, featuring heroes like Professor Portal, Andreas Fraudnaut, and Captain Peng, and villains like Dr. Data, Dr. Blackbox, and Miss Attribution.

When we originally discussed creating a comics, I didn’t expect it to be particularly successful as a marketing piece. I was mostly interested in giving the team something fun and creative to work on to avoid content fatigue.

But it turned out that mobile marketers really loved Mobile Hero Comics, and it continues to be a highly successful content project to this day.

So don’t be afraid to challenge your team with fun, creative projects that might seem a little crazy at first. You might be surprised.

Where Is the future of inbound marketing going?

With COVID-19 and the shift from offline marketing to 100% digital marketing, I expect that inbound marketing is that it’s going to become even more competitive.

I also think that many inbound marketers are going to start focusing much more on smaller, more highly targeted segments of the market that is more likely to convert to marketing qualified leads.

If you had asked me a year ago, I probably would have given a very different answer. But COVID-19 has changed the trajectory of inbound marketing quite a bit in just the last few months.

COVID-19 has dramatically accelerated the shift from traditional marketing to inbound marketing. Marketers hosting offline events and programs suddenly had to shift to digital marketing. And those of us who have been focused on digital marketing for a long time already found ourselves facing a lot more competition for attention at the top of the funnel.

For example, when the COVID-19 crisis first took hold, everyone shifted from hosting offline events to webinars and virtual events.

At first that was great. People suddenly working remotely were signing up for webinars in droves.

But then they started to experience “webinar fatigue.” With all the new webinars flooding the market, there were just too many. So it got a lot tougher for any one webinar to attract a sizable audience.

This prompted us to focus even more on our mid funnel, and I suspect many other inbound marketers are going to make a similar strategic shift if they haven’t already. I also suspect that this shift toward focusing on smaller, more targeted audiences will not just be a temporary trend, but a permanent shift in the industry.

To give you an example, at the start of quarantine we lauched the Mobile Heroes Lunch Club to focus more of our energy on a smaller, more targeted audience. These clubs bring together a small group of marketers once per week for 4 weeks in a virtual group discussion. Liftoff pays for lunch or dinner via a delivery service. The sessions are moderated by a fellow mobile marketer. Everyone talks shop and gets to learn from one another. And a Liftoff person is there as a host to offer event support.

Through these lunch clubs, we’re spending more time, effort and resources on a smaller, more targeted group of people who are more likely to do business with Liftoff at some point in the future.

I think this is a sign of the direction that many inbound marketers will be taking in the not-so-distant future.

Where can people learn more about You & Liftoff ?

Dennis Mink on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drmink/
Website: https://liftoff.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/liftoffmobile/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/liftoff.io
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/liftoffmobile