The funnel is dead. 

Say what? 

Yup, that funnel that you've been using for decades in your marketing and sales to generate traffic and then convert and close leads into customers is dead. 

Why is it dead? Because the funnel uses a linear approach and as our VP of Marketing Jon Dick says, 

"Funnels lose the energy you put into them once you reach the bottom... Funnels produce customers, but don’t consider how those customers can help you grow. And all the momentum you built acquiring that customer? Gone. Each day, each month, and each quarter, we have to start new."

In an internal meeting at HubSpot, Jon futher explained how: 

The problem with most companies is that they have built their company designed with my dad in mind and not me in mind. In a world where customers' main source of info was vendors, you thought of your business like a funnel. In a world where customer's main source of info is other customers, you think of your business like a flywheel that spins at the rate of your customer's delight. If you want to grow better in 2018, you need to match your business to the modern buyer, throw away the funnel and embrace the flywheel.

The Need for a New Growth Model

Did you know that 71% of consumers who have had a good social media service experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others?

Social media allows you to build brand awareness without needing to invest a ton in media, print or display advertising. It allows you to bring leads to your business by complementing or augmenting your other marketing efforts such as email or events.

Social media has replaced the need for an intermediary by enabling you to have a direct one-on-one contact with your prospects and customers in a genuine, human way. 

Through social conversations, you can build an authentic brand that attracts people to your business and builds loyalty with customers.

This all sounds great, right? The big question, though, is how do you truly make this happen and leverage the benefits of social media to help you grow your business. 

This is a guest post by my friend and colleague Sharen Murnaghan. 

There are two times a year when we deeply reflect on things: New Year's Eve and our birthday.

Typically, we reflect on what happened during the past year; what our plans or hopes are for the next year; what we accomplished in the past year; what were our failures and what were our successes.

August 18 was my birthday and it caused me to reflect on all these things and in particular to focus on successes.  

This was driven, I suppose, because I had recently watched Richard St. John’s Ted Talk on the 8 Secrets of Success. I even sent it to the WhatsApp group I share with my kids aspiring that they will watch it too and thus make them think about how they can become successful.  (Yes, I confess to being an ambitious mum!)

The Definition of Success vs. the Idea of Success

Inbound PR was born from experience. 

I come from a PR background. I spent three years working in PR across Germany and the UK. Having studied International Business and not PR I really needed to work on my writing skills. 

Because let's face it, what PR people excel at really is storytelling, often in the written form. That's what PR pros study when they go to university and that's what they do day in and day out.

But when I joined HubSpot and had to master inbound marketing, I had to nail down on the numbers game and think with measurement in mind from the start. And I think we all agree that measurement is not PR's forte. 

These two realisations - that PR people excel at content but they suck at measurement - gave birth to Inbound PR.

70% of investors make investment decisions on the basis of something they learned from digital research.

Is that surprising to you? To me, it's not.

What's most unique about the PR industry unlike any other discipline is that it deals with a multitude of stakeholders - buyers, media people, employees, investors. 

At the heart of Inbound PR is exactly that stakeholder persona that you need to get to know in and out around their challenges, consumption methods, research preferences, communication and information channels and most importantly decision-making process. 

Traditionally, you would think that investors wouldn't be spending their time on digital or trusting those sources, but that's how we thought about buyers and media people too. 

New research proves that you'd be better off with a similar inbound approach for your investors just as for your other stakeholders.