Inbound Marketing in Action
Inbound Marketing: FIrst Person Story
My company, OneWhitePixel, builds apps for mobile devices like iPhone and Android. We have world class designers and really smart developers, so we have a established a pretty good reputation through some amazing clients in government and the private sector in both the U.S. and Western Europe.
Last month, we also offered our first outside training course for developers who wanted to learn about programming for mobile devices. With only a month lead time to market the event to potential students, we decided to put Inbound Marketing to the test.
To avoid confusing existing clients, we built a separate website and splash page for the training program under a distinct brand called the Mobile App Institute and decided to use as many affordable digital tools as possible to drive traffic to the site. We employed a mix of online PR, social media, blogs and digital advertising — each performing its own function with links to the website.
We then developed our own content. We researched and created three story angles around the shortage of mobile app developers and the high salaries those programmers are getting – an issue The Wall Street Journal had written about earlier in the year, and we linked to that story. We also listed our course material in Scrib’d and Slide Rocket.
Each story angle led to a separate blog copy and a press release. We then developed our own Infographic using information from the press releases to create a unique proprietary illustration. All of this content was circulated through social media and distributed electronically to the press via Pitch Engine and PRWeb.com. We were fortunate that one of our press releases was published in Yahoo! News, spreading our message widely on the web.
In the end, for one month’s work, we scored 800 unique page views. This was more than enough to fill our 10 empty seats and attract inquiries from as far as away as
California and Holland. Our total marketing spend for this? Less than $3,000!
Does Inbound Marketing work? In our case, I think it certainly enhanced our brand visibility and our recruiting efforts. Did Inbound Marketign alone account for the full class of 11 people? I can’t say it did, but we didn’t expect it to. But it did help in many ways. When we start marketing our next class scheduled in September, we will have a base of new followers and a great, low cost experience to learn from and build uon.
