A few weeks ago I sat an exam for the first time in many years. It was the online certification test for Inbound Marketing University, a project driven by Hubspot, providers of a web based software solution that is designed to assist SMEs with, well, inbound marketing. The ‘professors’ of Inbound Marketing are all high level practitioners in their relative fields – it reads like a who’s who of ‘new marketing’ types.
What’s Inbound Marketing anyway?
Inbound Marketing is the antithesis of many elements of traditional marketing – it’s about creating relationships and establishing a presence, making potential customers aware of you in a more natural way than interruptive tactics like TV advertising.
Course overview
The course was broken into three areas, Get Found, Convert and Analyze. I’ll give an overview of each.
Get Found is centred on being there when people are looking for you, meeting them on their terms, in their places like Twitter and Facebook, but it’s a permission based relationship – someone chooses to follow you on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook because of the value you provide to the community through the content that you create. The stand-out class in this section was David Meerman Scott’s, if you’ve read his books, New Rules of Marketing and PR and World Wide Rave then you already know it, but his approach is dead on. Another key component to the Get Found section is search engine optimisation with two very strong classes on the subject.
The Convert part of the course is all about how you handle leads, whether someone is ready to buy or not, there is a way to strengthen the relationship. Providing useful content doesn’t stop once you’ve got someone interested. The classes covered landing pages, lead nurturing and email marketing.
The Analyze part of the course was handled in one lesson and if I have any criticism of the course, it was in this area. There was only one class on this and it kept things pretty simple. That’s not a criticism of the class in itself – everybody needs a 101 in analytics and it had important and valuable lessons. However if you want to get really deep into the analysis however you’d be better served by picking up a copy of Web Analytics an Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik (Google Analytics evangelist) and pre-ordering his forthcoming second book too.
Effort and reward
I gave myself two weeks to get through all the classes in and took the exams on the first day of the period in mid August. People who took it in the first exam period in June had a little less time to take it all in – the live webinars were spread over two days. Whilst you miss out a little on the experience by watching the classes later instead of live, don’t be put off because of that at all. You’ll find a lot of the ‘ask the teacher’ questions you come up with during the course of the class are asked by others at the end anyway.
I am pleased to say that I passed the exam, with a decent score and I’m proudly displaying my Inbound Marketing Certified Professional badge in the sidebar of my blog. I would like to publicly thank everyone at Hubspot for the immense effort that that put into this project, all the professors that created such excellent classes and a hat tip for the infrastructure sponsors that made it possible.
If you’re interested in taking the qualification, jump on over to Inbound Marketing University, read up a little more, watch one or two classes, create an account and get notified when the signups are open for the next exam session in October. Happy studying!
Image credit: Robert Crum
