Just when you thought it was safe to close the door on your inbound and online marketing vocabulary-building efforts, there’s one more to add to the list — and in terms of bottom-line profitability, it’s among the most critical entries: context marketing.

About BEE International & Their Challenges

Just one hour south of Hubspot, in South Easton, MA, lives BEE International, a worldwide supplier of high pressure homogenizers (specialized lab equipment for particle size reduction and cell lysis). When we first met BEE International in May 2015, they had been using the Hubspot platform for several years, but hadn’t seen much growth after implementation even though they had some inbound marketing best practices in place. Here are the specific challenges that BEE faced:

When it comes to measuring performance, the inbound marketing landscape is dominated by quantitative metrics such as website traffic (organic, affiliate, PPC, etc.), time on site, conversion rate for various digital properties and landing pages, lead generation, and the list goes on. Obviously, all of these metrics are vital for managing and optimizing various inbound marketing programs, campaigns, strategies and tactics. However, they do not tell the full story.

Many businesses want to change domain names, perhaps because a coveted domain is finally available, they want to consolidate multiple domains into a single digital property, or their current domain name is no longer (and may have never really been) aligned with your brand or offering.

If you’re an owner or decision-maker in a B2B organization, then you might be standing on the sidelines of this whole “inbound marketing thing,” waiting and wondering if it’s really something that you should be doing. In three words: yes, you should.

Some web designers and even some marketing agencies believe that there’s no fundamental difference (let alone a whole bunch of them) between a B2C website and a B2B website. To say that these people are wrong is a gross understatement.

Since email marketing has been around for a couple of decades (though in various ways and versions), it’s easy to forget that this staple of the online marketing world is by no means headed for virtual pasture. On the contrary, when it’s done right, email marketing has never been as important or profitable. For example:

Let’s start with this: inbound marketingworks. And you don’t have to take our word for it. Behold:

Inbound marketing isn’t so much an evolution of conventional (“interrupt”) marketing as it is a re-invention of it, and the reason is simple: conventional marketing results are notoriously difficult – and in some cases, impossible – to truly and accurately measure. Now, this doesn’t mean that conventional marketing is a useless money pit. It’s still alive and well, and there are scenarios where conventional marketing is the best (or sometimes, the only) way to reach target markets and build brand awareness.

A few millennia ago when Confucius declared that one should “hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles,” it’s certain that he wasn’t referring to business strategy (because there was no accompanying TED Talks and certification program). But his sage advice does apply to today’s business landscape; specifically when it comes to the topic of customer loyalty.