Marketing is a Love-Hate Relationship:

• You Love when it’s working.
• You Hate the other 99% of the time.

So, What’s Wrong With Marketing?

It’s Interruptive
The vast majority of today’s marketing attempts to interrupt what you’re doing, appeal to your thinking and/or emotions, and persuade you to take action.

It’s Disconnected
Businesses like to focus on what their products and services do, while, on the other hand, target audiences are thinking in terms of their own wants and needs.

Two Ways About It

In the traditional marketing process, known as Outbound Marketing, messages are pushed out to audiences. Whereas Inbound Marketing applies a process in which audiences intentionally seek out information.

Out With the Old and . . .

You can see the transformation happening. Examples of the types of information people want and need exist around us.

Where We’re Heading

A 2011 survey of 644 small and medium sized businesses’ marketing budgets includes two especially noteworthy takeaways:

• Budgets for Inbound Marketing are now at levels exceeding Outbound Marketing
• Small businesses are spending higher percentages on Inbound Marketing initiatives than medium sized.

This is particularly interesting for small businesses who seem to understand that Inbound Marketing initiatives such as social media, SEO and blogs are giving them a competitive advantage over larger companies.

UBG is Lead Sponsor of the Highlands Soccer Club

For the 2nd year straight, UBG is the lead sponsor of the Highlands Soccer Club. HSC is a community based nonprofit with 70 volunteers and 300-400 children based in Issaquah, WA.

UBG’s President, Umit Gokce, is also Director/Founder of HSC. He says, “UBG is very proud to support HSC’s mission of promoting teamwork and wellness within the community. It’s a program many children and parents enjoy and find lasting value in.”

Branding, Website and eLearning Services Donation

UBG is donating services including branding, creating HSC’s Website and a planned Coaching Program for both coaches and parents to use at home. The Coaching Program will feature video clips shot from a player’s perspective (sample below), interactive PDFs and other digital media.

The Web content solution UBG recommends can be best described as a Content Universe. Yes, it sounds a bit grand (and spacey?), but it turns out the universe is a very apt metaphor for your content strategy.

To explain, Web content can be seen as associated initiatives on circular timelines. Here’s how a Content Universe would be organized:

• universe: all the content on the Web
• galaxy: a category of interest (e.g., music)
• solar system: an entity (e.g., a music business) existing in a galaxy
• sun: a target audience
• planet: a type of Web content (e.g., a music blog)
• moon: something (e.g., a Tweet) supporting a planet

A Sample Universe