Absolutely. What AI says is in its sights is just one segment of the main Inbound Marketing strategies used globally — search, especially organic search.
But even at this point the threat is not that strong. In a recent article here on the blog, we showed how ChatGPT, after two years of use, does not even have 4% of the traffic that Google has, according to Similarweb .
The main point we need to take into account when talking germany email list about Inbound Marketing strategies is that they are the main strategies of digital marketing.
And so, also understanding that AI can — perhaps, in the future, who knows… — even dominate a specific aspect or action, but there is a whole ocean of possibilities within this area of activity.
But it’s not just AI that’s changing the world of digital marketing. Content has changed, social media has changed, and the marketing ecosystem in general is different from what it was in 2010, with the popularization of Inbound.
In today's article, we'll delve deeper into the changes that Inbound Marketing has been undergoing, and understand what works and what stopped working some time ago.
What usually changes and what doesn't change in Inbound Marketing
Have you noticed that at the end of every year, dozens of pages and blogs about digital marketing start talking about the “new trends” for the following year?
You will rarely find completely new actions and strategies in these lists, mainly because the biggest changes in Digital Marketing usually come all at once, and are rarely announced from one year to the next.
In other words: if the trend is so disruptive that it is included in a list, it should already be put into practice.
Before starting the text, which will bring two lists, we need a more abstract and theoretical moment to understand what tends to change in Inbound Marketing over the years.
The factor that undergoes the most changes is related to specific materials and lead generation opportunities — in other words: the Top of the Funnel.
The ways of engaging the public are constantly changing. In the past, for example, Social Media Marketing was mainly used by large companies, while smaller companies had a hard time generating leads through this channel.
Today, the biggest companies invest heavily in Social, but the strategy has become much more accessible for small brands, who prefer to invest in this channel instead of working with the classic website + blog + ads combo.
And even within the Social universe, content has been undergoing major transformations.
What was once the main territory of blogs is now dispersed between Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and other platforms.
And even the format of this content is different. We've already found real essays made in a carousel of 10 posts on Instagram, and podcasts have gained a lot of traction lately.
What doesn’t usually change are the goals behind creating these materials.
These objectives are not very subject to very sudden technological changes, as is the case with content production.
New objectives are faced with the creation of new methodologies — e.g.: Inbound and Outbound , when more specific, become ABM.
The emergence of new general digital marketing technologies usually comes to facilitate the application of these methods and achieve these corporate objectives. The objectives are usually:
Generate more visibility: brand awareness strategies , increasing website visitors, widespread social impact;
Generate more leads: what are the conversion strategies, how to offer value for conversion, how to track lead behavior, how to organize all the information in understandable dashboards;
Generate more sales: how to ensure the best lead nurturing, the best sales approaches, how to do good Bottom of the Funnel prospecting, etc.
In other words: the classic Sales Funnel.
So we understand each other: what usually changes are the resources used by the methodologies, while the methodologies themselves do not change that much.
With that understood, let's now talk about what has really changed — what made sense and no longer does, and what won't stop making sense for a long time.
Inbound Marketing Strategies That Are Stopping Working
But now we enter the second controversy here in the text: it is very difficult to find any type of Inbound Marketing strategy that simply stops working.
In fact, it is very difficult to find any type of marketing strategy that simply stops working from one day to the next.
To give you an idea, the first publication in the world that mentioned discount coupons, free samples and “we’ll give you your money back” was Scientific Advertising, written by John C. Hopkins in 1923.
And these strategies weren’t invented in this book. Hopkins was at the height of his career in the 1920s, and he talks about how he applied them in the 19th century, especially between 1890 and 1910.
As we discussed, what tends to become obsolete are not exactly the strategies and methodologies, but practices and materials.
Here we list the 5 main points that have been outdated for some time now within Inbound Marketing, for a number of reasons. Find out more:
SEO/Leadgen is all about numbers
The main objective of SEO and organic traffic is to bring new people to your website, increasing the number of visitors.
This is what the strategy makes very clear: the more visitors, the more leads. The more leads, the more sales.
This is not a lie, nor is it becoming outdated. What has changed is that the quantity of visitors and leads is not as important as their quality.
Just think: you are generating 300 leads per month, and 50 of them are qualified.
If you were generating 100 leads per month, you would be generating about 17 qualified leads, proportionally. So generating more is good, right?
It depends. If your campaigns and materials were more tailored to your target audience, if your lead generation offers were more in line with them, you could generate the same 300 leads, with 200 of them being qualified.
The same goes for visitors. There’s no point in generating tens of thousands of visitors per month if most of them come from a single source — a single blog, for example.
So, generating lots of leads and visitors isn’t an old-fashioned strategy, but not understanding where those people are coming from certainly is.
Overdoing the hype
Magalu recently made a series of posts about the “case of the girl on the plane”, riding the hype of viralization.
Is this interesting for Magalu? Of course: as a retail company, the more it rides the wave of viralizations, the better.
But the issue here is different. With the investment in advertising that the girl on the plane received, Magalu could create several content strategies with already established influencers and creators .
This eliminates the main risk of surfing the hype: the uncertainty of the future and the past.
Magalu, because it is so fast, has no idea where the girl on the plane came from. She stops being a person and becomes just another cog in the brand's marketing strategy.
Which in itself is a big problem. People are unpredictable. The girl on the plane has no branding, no editorial identity, and therefore doesn’t have what we like to call “mincing her words”.
What if the girl on the plane is cancelled tomorrow? Magalu is then investing both financial and intangible resources, such as its reputation, in someone who does not provide any guarantees.
And not to mention that this strategy completely overshadowed Magalu's latest case, which managed to go viral with a push notification about olive oil during Black Friday.
Instagram only with likes
Why spend money to create an Instagram presence if all it gives you are likes, a few comments and complaints in the DM?
Unfortunately, this is the case for most brands with a presence on social media.
Some service businesses that invest heavily in content benefit from this — if the product offering is affordable and just a few clicks away from the latest post, it’s definitely worth investing in Instagram content creation.