Three Nearbound Marketing Tactics to Start Using Now

Did you notice the change? No, I don't mean us taking a week off from publishing on this podcast last week, though, I'm sure you missed us. I'm talking about the rebrand, the new name of the show marketing together is now near bound marketing. In case you missed all the buzz on LinkedIn in Boston at HubSpot's inbound conference, where reveal was shown some very nice love from the HubSpot partner folks and anywhere else you hang out with fellow marketers, partner hacker, the team ultimately. Behind this show and others in this podcast network has been renamed to near bound. com. Why? Because a bigger shift is happening in the market. A wider conversation is happening about how all go to market motions are changing, or at least how they need to. I loved how my friend Cassidy Shield, who's the CRO over at Refine Labs, put it when he was commenting on a post from Jared, Isaac, or maybe it was actually the one from Jill Rowley last week. Essentially he said, it's gone from never hearing the term at all to all I hear is this term. Talking about near bound that comment basically sums up the sentiment we've started to explore on this show. The future of GTM is here. The future is near bound. You may have already heard this term used by myself and even guests on the show, as we've been exploring different topics related to marketing together. But with the updated name and updated, very cool branding, shout out to Ella Aaron and the rest of the nearbound. com team that work tirelessly behind the scenes on this show, I thought it would be worthwhile to level set. Let's start with answering the basic question. What. Is Nearbound is the go to market strategy that taps into those buyers trust at every stage of the journey for Intel intros and influence. Those three I's are going to be very important in a common theme of this show. Going forward, Nearbound matters right now because buyer behavior. Matters. We've moved from the how economy to the who economy. Basically the way to sum that up is buyers aren't asking, how do I solve X? There's too much noise, too many available answers that they don't know if they can trust. SEO is gamed ads and cold emails show up in their inbox and on their display without context or credibility. Now buyers are asking. Who can help me solve X they're looking to the nodes of trust in their network where outbound interrupts and inbound attracts near bound surrounds. So what does that mean for you? If you're not working with those that your buyers already trust, especially those already living in your ecosystem to surround them across the entire life cycle and throughout their buyer journey, You are going to lose to those who are nearbound impacts, not just marketing, but sales success and partnerships teams. It's not a department, but a strategy that overlays every department with a series of motions and tactics that we're going to continue to explore on this podcast under a new name. So as we've been doing with marketing together, and we'll continue to do under the new banner of Nearbound Marketing, we'll keep exploring these questions like who are the people that serve as those nodes of trust living around my buyers. How do I build relationships with those people? How do I market with them effectively? And how do I establish and maintain trust with those people? As I work to establish trust with my buyers together with them. And what about those old. Outbound and inbound motions. What's going to change? What's going to stay the same as we go from a world in which we focus on marketing to, to one where we focus on marketing with, we're going to continue to talk about the various types of near bound evangelists. You can activate how to market with them and how to measure success. In this new era. So to start this new season together, if you will, I thought what better way to kick it off than to share where I'm currently experimenting and learning as my company teamwork. com adopts a nearbound marketing approach. You see, I recently made a transition from head of partnerships where I was responsible for the day to day build out and execution of our solution partner program at teamwork. com to a new role. In evangelism and content marketing, officially joining the marketing team after being an annoying unofficial member for quite some time hosting our weekly podcast and monthly live streams under our media brand agency life. When I said earlier that Nearbound is not a department, but a strategy that overlays. Every department, my personal role transition over at teamwork. com is actually evidence of this very fact in real time. That being said, it wasn't just the nearbound. com and reveal teams that just got back from HubSpot's annual inbound conference. In Boston last week, I was there with a fairly large crew from teamwork. com. And I wanted to share with you how we're leveraging Nearbound in our own marketing efforts, what we're trying, what's worked, maybe what hasn't and what I'm learning along the way. So here are three of my takeaways from last week. I think you'll be able to learn from, or at least. Get something from, as you think about adopting a nearbound marketing approach going forward. Number one, how we sold out a private event in under 24 hours. Number two, how we booked demos that I am sure we would have missed. Otherwise at the event and number three, how we got distribution support from a larger partner company. All right, let's take each of these in turn. Number one, how we sold out that private event in under 24 hours. And this one really shows the power of private communities to exert. Influence on the people that you're trying to reach. You see at teamwork. com, I've formed a relationship with Nicole Pereira. She is an agency owner and has since become a teamwork. com solution partner under her consultancy by the name of culture ish when we knew that we wanted to put on our. Own small private event outside of inbound as a lot of people do who are exhibiting and sponsoring in Boston during the week of inbound, I knew that we needed to get the word out about our events. So naturally we plan some posting on LinkedIn. We hit up our email list, but here's what I did differently. I went to Nicole who is not only one of our partners at teamwork. com, but she is an experienced agency owner. She's plugged in to this audience that we have been trying to reach of Agency owners and operators. And here's what she did. She posted on LinkedIn and we got some responses, but then she went and posted about the event in a private Facebook group that is only open to HubSpot solution partners. So a ton of agency owners that fit our ICP, we went from worrying about filling up our max capacity to concerned about being way over and the fire department being called the event actually turned out great. Uh, we had a number of people trickling into the beginning and we were over capacity, but able to manage it. And most importantly, we got prospects, partners, and customers in the same room, enjoying a smaller, more intimate event than the large conference at the convention center at inbound itself and letting those conversations happen as. A marketer, you know, anytime your prospects, partners, and customers can be in the same room, some magic happens, but we tapped into a near bound tactic here by partnering with one of our partners to get people there in the first place, really near bound at work in this instance. All right. Number two, I mentioned that we were able to book some demos at the teamwork. com booth at inbound that I don't think we would have gotten otherwise. And this relates to another one of our solution partners, Zen pilot. A few weeks back on this show, we had. Kuba greats are, he is on the marketing team at Zen pilot, one of our solution partners at teamwork. com. So between myself and a few other members of the team, as we were heading into inbound, you're always thinking about if we're spending a bunch of money on a booth, how are we going to get people there? Well, my thinking is oftentimes people are a little hesitant to come to a booth because they know it's staffed with salespeople who are going to give them a pitch. Maybe they're going to exchange some swag or a giveaway, but really the give to get is still that demo that is very biased based on a salesperson's commission check being tied to. How that demo goes, right? So we took two of our solution partners, one being Zen pilot and said, why don't you guys take over our booth for a while? We'll create some graphics for you guys to share. You're bringing a big crew to inbound. We'll let you quote unquote, take over our booth for a teamwork partner takeover time, and you guys can promote that. And guess what? We had at least one prospect. I remember very specifically, he said, Hey, I'm using this project management platform. That's a competitive solution to teamwork. com, but I know, and trust the guys at Zen pilot. So if they're doing stuff with you, if they're putting out stuff on LinkedIn, if they're planning designated time to not just swing by your booth, but this coordinated takeover. Maybe I should look at what you guys are doing. So this agency owner one probably wouldn't have stopped by otherwise. And the conversations that happened since then, we didn't need to explain as much why he should give us his time and consideration that. Bridge had already been crossed because he heard a message from someone he already knew and trusted in this case is in pilot. Our solution partner was that note of trust that allowed us to change the buying process for this prospect, considering teamwork. com. All right. Number three is all about securing a commitment from a larger organization that we were already partnered with, but looking for more of a commitment to do some co marketing together. And this one was really evidence to me that not all partnerships are created equal. You see the inbound conference that HubSpot puts on every year is great for us at teamwork. com because our ICP very closely aligns with the HubSpot solution partner profile. A lot of agencies and professional service firms that are doing client work, which is really our niche. But there were a ton of app partners like teamwork that had a heavy presence, not only at partner day on Tuesday, but exhibiting at booths and speaking and. In Boston throughout the week at inbound. And several of those are ones that at teamwork. com, we definitely want to partner with some of those organizations so that we could talk about our better together story and our integrations to our mutual customer base, our mutual audience, or just add value to our mutual target audience by collaborating on content together. So. At teamwork, we're not a small company. We're between three and 400 people globally, but we're nowhere near the size of a hump spot or some of the other larger app partners that were at inbound. So when we were talking to an integration partner about executing some nearbound marketing campaigns together, I imagine it's how you may have felt when looking to partner up. With a larger organization, it can be intimidating. It can even seem like it's going to be fruitless to ask them for any sort of commitment from a bigger partner where they bring a lot more to the table. What are they going to get out of this partnership? But what I was able to see in this case was that matching up resources and capabilities really was the key. So I was talking to a partner marketing lead at a much larger company and she turned to me and said, I can help you with distribution. If you can help with content ideation and creation, I was like done and done. We have invested more in content creation and those resources. My move into evangelism and content marketing at teamwork. com. Is evidence of that. They currently just based on their team structure, don't have as many resources for content creation. So the fact that they're larger and we're smaller, isn't the beginning and end of that conversation. By looking at the puzzle pieces that we have to be able to put together, we can bring different things to the relationship and you can as well with your partners and still make it a win win or a win win win because one plus one equals three. Am I right? All right. Those were my three takeaways from our efforts to execute nearbound marketing before, during, and after inbound this year that just wrapped up last week. So I hope those gave you something to think about and maybe a few ideas to steal for your own nearbound marketing efforts from here. Hopefully this episode serves as not only a bit of a change up, but also the proper context to help you to continue. To get value out of this show as we continue to explore the motions and tactics that make up Nearbound Marketing. I'll call out two more things from here. As we wrap today, Atomola, Aaron, and Will on the Nearbound. com team are dropping killer videos. Seriously. I'm jealous of their production chops. They are dropping these videos on LinkedIn. On all things Nearbound. So check out their profiles in the episode description below and give them a follow. Lastly, the team at Nearbound. com did a great job of rounding up several of the conversations we've had on this show. Plus a few live streams I did with Isaac Morehouse, who is now CMO at Reveal for Reveal's Nearbound at Work series and organizing it into a very thorough writeup, which is titled Nearbound Marketing, a Trust Driven Path in the Who. Economy going back to the shift that we see in the market from the how economy to the who economy. We'll link to that for you in the description as well. As always, thank you so much for listening and we'll see you right here next week on Nearbound Marketing.