Kipp Bodnar
Appearances
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Hey, Hala. Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
The world of marketing changed a bunch with the internet. Before the internet, people remember, it was largely TV ads, billboards, direct mail, all those things. And they were all really annoying, right? Because you didn't opt into any of those things. The commercials interrupted your television when we didn't have streaming services everywhere, right?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
You'd go home and your mailbox would be full of advertisements that you didn't subscribe to or didn't want. And that was very outbound, very interruptive. And we were basically like, well, now that the internet exists, there's a whole different way to do marketing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
You can do it in an inbound way where you create content and pull people in through search engines, through social media, through email marketing, through things that people opt into and want to participate in. And that was now seems obvious because it's how the internet works, but 20 years ago was fairly revolutionary. So we created a new category.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I didn't work at McKinsey. I don't have an MBA. I'm an untraditional marketing leader. Marketing is a game of arbitrage. The best marketers in the world just figure out where there are inefficiencies, where things are underpriced. They lean very aggressively into those things to get a really high return.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I think accelerating a business career growth, it's all very similar. I think it's about how do you really focus on the small set of things that are gonna give you the high magnitude of return? I think so often people get caught up in operational details or let everybody else push their priorities on them, where you have to be like, you have to look at the situation and say,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And sometimes if you're in marketing or if you're an entrepreneur and you're starting a company, The best thing you can do is, there's a great quote out there, better is a debate, different is a choice. When you force somebody to make a choice and you do that by creating a new category where it's like, hey, do you wanna do this new awesome inbound thing that works really great?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Or do you wanna do that old stodgy outbound thing that everybody hates? We tell that story and people are like, oh, I wanna do the new cool thing that people like. I don't wanna do the old bad thing that everybody hates. But if we had just said, oh, like, hey, we can help you do your direct mail a little bit better. Who cares? Well, maybe it's good enough. Do I really even need better?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I don't know what you're talking about, right? And so painting a clear choice for your target audience is so powerful. It takes a little bit longer, right? Because people aren't familiar with it. There's a level of education that you have to do, but anybody can do it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And if you're in it for a long haul, if you think you have a big opportunity and your business is a five, 10, 20 year thing, then it's a really important thing to take advantage of to actually be differentiated in the market.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Oh, yeah. It's a great question. What works in marketing in 2025? A few things. Creators. Working, partnering, or being with creators and these modern media companies like you run, Hala. Huge opportunity. Huge, huge opportunity there. We work deeply with creators. I'm a creator myself. It works. YouTube. YouTube works. YouTube is an exceptional channel to drive awareness and monetization.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
It is much harder to disrupt through artificial intelligence, which is kind of the thing that's changing marketing the most. Blogging still works. It does. But it works for... the very focused universe of the industry you solve, where you have unique data, unique insight, unique credibility, you can get that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
You can't go and talk about everything in the world and get search traffic, but you can focus on your core niche and get a good baseline audience through blogging. Those things are completely working. Partnering with creators, even through advertising means, hugely, hugely valuable. The other thing that's working,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
A lot of people are doing events and in person because we've gotten so segmented, no shared experiences. I think if you're selling high, big ticket, expensive things, bringing people together in person is becoming something that all the marketers I talk to are spending more money on this year, not less money on.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I have a rule that I don't make anything without being clear on how I'm going to get it distributed and what the distribution advantages are. I think Substack, if you're an entrepreneur, has a little bit of built-in audience, but it's not worth it because the bigger built-in audience is information discovery. And I say that kind of broader than search.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And so if I were starting today and it was just me, you and I were starting a company, we were going to go out and do something. I would start a blog on my website for a couple of reasons. One, a ton of people still use Google search. And you still can get a lot of traffic from Google search.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
What are the three to five things that if I do, I will be 10 times more successful than anybody else in the situation? And that sounds simple, but it is the thing that I think matters the most.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
The second thing is people are using AI for discovery, chat GPT search, Google deep research, grok, all these things and perplexity. And what we have seen is that Text-based content and video-based content that's cited in those results still gets a real amount of traffic. I host a podcast called Marketing Against the Grain. We did a video on DeepSeek when DeepSeek first came out.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And it got recommended on everybody's chat GPT queries on DeepSeek. And we got... 50,000 views in like 24 hours because everybody was searching for it and we had a really good credible thing. And so it's almost like the distribution for text and video is getting better. What's changing is that it's a little less attributable, right?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Because if somebody is getting it in like chat GPT or perplexity, they may be reading information and see your link, but they might not directly click back to it. proportion are, but a much smaller portion than historically in Google. But you're still getting the awareness, the distribution, the brand recognition for being like a credible resource in those things.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And that's why I think you have to have a pretty healthy blog and YouTube strategy to surface in all these new models.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And by the way, there's compounding benefits to all this, right? Like, if I get discovered in ChatGPT and I get really good engagement on my video, then YouTube's going to be like, oh, this is clearly a good video, so I'm going to prioritize it more in YouTube search.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And then you get more in the YouTube algorithm and the YouTube search engine, and then you have a video that completely takes off because of it, and that's awesome.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
So competitive, right?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Here's my advice on content creation day. First, people have never wanted more actionable content ever. They don't just wanna learn something. They want something that's gonna lead them to immediately take action. And so anytime you're creating content that's gonna allow people to immediately take action,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
that they can take, especially like in free tools or free platforms, that's going to take off. It's going to go great. I see that all the time. I imagine you see that all the time. That is clearly a trend that is happening. The second thing people want is unique data and perspective. If you have a survey of 2000 people in a given industry, people are going to check it out.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Because they wanna know, benchmark, they wanna see how they're doing, they're competitive, they wanna compare themselves, all that stuff happens, right? And so you are gonna see that be a real standout thing. And so that's where proprietary research, customer data, things like that are a huge leverage. And then the third is, can you be really contrarian and have a good argument?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Can you go against the status quo and change people's thinking with a real deep and thoughtful reasoned argument about something? And if you can do that, you're also going to get people's attention. What would you add? You're doing this all the time. What'd I miss?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
The prompt I've always given myself is, is what I'm about to do going to be 10 times more valuable for people? Or would somebody pay $1,000, $2,000 to have access to this? And if the answer to one of those two questions is yes, it's going to be really successful.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And if the answer's no, it's probably going to be middling in average.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I think the first entrepreneurship thing I had, I would go to Sam's Club and Walmart and find clearance items and flip them on eBay when I was in high school. And so I was always somebody who was obsessed with arbitrage. How do you buy low and sell high? And where are the inefficiencies of a market? And... One of the great things about marketing is that marketing is a game of arbitrage.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Email is super important. And here's why email is super important from like a principle base. It's one of the few channels you actually control. There's not an algorithm. Somebody gives you permission to email them and you get to send them a message and you actually own that email address. Somebody can't come along and change the Google algorithm, the YouTube algorithm, the LinkedIn algorithm.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I know people are all up in arms about LinkedIn algorithm changes recently. And so that's the real value of email marketing is that you have way more ownership and control of email marketing than most other channels out there. And so once you kind of have that foundation, you're like, okay, email marketing still matters. What am I going to do?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And the number one thing you're going to do is to have as highly personalized email as possible. And that's writing your emails with AI. So one of the things we did at HubSpot is we have what's called HubSpot Academy, which teaches you how to do marketing, how to use our software, all of those things. And there's a bunch of different courses on HubSpot Academy.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And we basically, when people come into HubSpot and maybe consume a article or a free guide or a webinar or what have you, we'll then send a follow-up email that is custom, one-on-one, written from them by AI, and that we recommend based on everything we know about them, the content they've consumed, what the best course for them to take is.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Not only do we mention their business, but we have puns, like AI has gotten very good at that. And it feels like a human researches company and wrote them an email. And that email converts 80 to 100% better than our normal emails.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And so that is number one, anything you can do to better personalize your email and make it relevant to their problem and their experience with your company and your website, you are going to get much, much better results.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Look, you give them the great ways to do that, which is offer something really valuable that you consider charging money for. Remember that marketing is kind of a lesson in economics. It's what do you want to sell versus what do you want to give away to sell a bigger thing down the road? And how do you offset how you think about that?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And so for me, the things that are really good, if you have any free tools, great. If you have any templates, like you do the work of building out a big Excel sheet with formulas and everything that people could just drop their own data in. they will give you an email address for that. I promise you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
One of the things that worked really well at HubSpot back in the day, and you can do similar versions of this now, is we would find our customers always needed stock photography and imagery for their email newsletters, their landing page.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And I was like, well, what if we just hire a freelance photographer, buy the rights out for like $10,000 to 500 different pictures, and we just give those away for free instead of them having to pay Getty Images or all these people. And I think over the years, we've had like 5 million downloads. I can't even tell you how popular that has been.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
But it's looking at your market, thinking about something that they do that they spend money on and say, hey, can I give that to them for free? And if you can, you will get whatever information you want in exchange for them saving that money.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
The best marketers in the world just figure out where there are inefficiencies, where things are underpriced. They lean very aggressively into those things to get a really high return.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
About 10 years ago, we were like, hey, you know what? The world is changing and trust is becoming the most important thing. And one of the ways you can build trust with people is to let them try before they buy. And like your webinar is a great example of that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
It's like, hey, if I'm on a 30, 60 minute webinar with you, I probably have a pretty good idea about what your course is gonna look like, what the quality is gonna be, what it's gonna feel like, the experience. And so I'm much more likely to have trust and go buy that course.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
So if you use our free version of HubSpot CRM, you're much more likely to buy a paid version because you're like, hey, you know what? I'm up and running on this. I've closed a couple of deals with it. I understand the features that if I pay for them that I would get. And you know what? I kind of need them because I think I would make even more money if I paid for those features.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And it's a whole different... game. Right now, we all have access to infinite knowledge with AI. Knowledge is a complete commodity. So in that world, trust becomes everything. People can know who you are, but they can still not trust you at all. And giving that value away is how you build trust. And so for us, the free version of our product, so we do it, but you have webinars.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And so what happens when you go and then work at a startup at the time, I think HubSpot was about 100 people when I joined, you go from just running really fast by yourself to needing to run really fast with a bunch of other people. And that's the biggest change. And you have to adopt a different mindset. And I think the mindset there is, I have limited scale, just me.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
There is a version of that for any business, is I think what I would say.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I have a Maxim I live by and its distribution is undefeated. If you can get a big audience, you can always figure out how to make money on it. The inverse is not true. You could have an expensive product and sell it to a few people, or you can have a big audience and sell it to a lot, lot more people, but it's gonna take a little bit of time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
It's a different way of thinking, but distribution is the biggest reason most businesses don't grow because they just don't have a big enough audience, universe of people who actually care about them and the thing that they're offering in the world.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I could accomplish much bigger things if I do it with other people, but I got to bring them along for that journey. If I just try to push my agenda on everybody else, nobody's going to understand. They're not going to have the context and we're not going to go anywhere. And so I think the biggest shift from being somebody who is working solo or on a small team to being on a bigger team is that
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
So if you think about CRM, there's lots of views of what CRMs are, but what they really are is a single source of truth for your customers and your prospects. So instead of your support team working out of a project management system, sales reps working out of spreadsheets, all of those things, everybody, your marketers, your sellers, your customer service folks, all working together.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Updating one record, all the context in one place, and then being able to do really powerful things, whether it be advertising, email marketing, marketing automation, sales call prep, sales follow-up, sales automation, all of those things. That's what you're talking about doing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And you're going to see CRM be way more important over the next couple of years because what's going to happen with CRM over the next even year is that all the unstructured data, your meeting recordings, the emails you exchange, all of those things things, all that context are going to make it way better. Your CRM is just going to generate the email follow-up to your meeting for you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And it's like, oh, great. I know I need to follow up from this meeting, but I've got to go run to this other meeting right now. Well, it's great. I can do it in 30 seconds versus having to do it 15 minutes tonight when I've forgotten half the things and need to go look them up, right? And that is why CRM is so important. It also
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
is when you have all your data in one place, you can do real reporting and actually understand what's working and what's not working. And as somebody who has helped grow a business from tens of millions of dollars to billions of dollars, it's done through basic iteration over a long period of time, finding problems, solving them and building and iterating.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And you can't do that without your data in one place and some clear reporting.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
How do you actually clearly articulate the problem you're going to solve in a way that people are really excited to solve it with you? Because when you're a solopreneur, you don't have to do that. You can just do what's in your head and go.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
tons, tons of AI agents. So first of all, the most used AI features at HubSpot, one is to prep for sales meetings. So we have a co-pilot where it just will take everything from a contact record and give you the full prep summary. That's awesome. We have an agent called Content Remix. So like, let's say you're going to run a content campaign. You're going to do an email newsletter.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Let's say you're going to do a webinar. You're going to do a webinar. It will spin up the landing page, the email, the ad assets, everything for you and does all the manual work in the background. And then we also have a product that our co-founder at our mesh started called agent.ai, which is a marketplace of agents where you can go and anybody can build or use different agents.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
It's kind of like, a modern automation marketplace where if you have a problem, you can either use Agent.ai to build it or somebody's already built it and you can just use their agent. Like a really good example is there's a company research agent that will give you like a McKinsey analyst level kind of deep detail briefing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Who's the CEO, funding history, core products, competitors, the whole thing. And it'll do it in like two minutes, right? Perfectly formatted for free. That is just a game changer when it comes to agents.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I would pick one AI tool and get really good at it. And for marketers, that's probably Claude. For sellers, that's probably ChatGPT. And you're gonna use those tools. The reason I say Claude has the best taste, it's really good at writing. You can upload to projects in Claude and have really great specific, highly repeatable writing output that's core to marketing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
For sellers, I think one of the best AI features that exists on the planet is ChatGPT's deep research feature, where you can have it go and just build a incredibly complex research report. And it might research a problem for five, 10, 20 minutes with all these different agents in the background going and doing that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And you having the full map to an industry, the accounts within the industry, how your product maps, the core competitors in that industry, those things become super valuable. So that's where I would focus if I was just like feeling overwhelmed and not yet started.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
A few things. So one of the other agents we have is called our customer agent, and it basically helps resolve customer support. Like the average HubSpot customer solves 30% of their support questions are answered by AI or answered by our agent. And so that's 30% less support people, support time, founder time, depending on the size and scale of company that you have to spend.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And if you focus on it, we've seen customers get to like 50, 60% deflection, which is huge, saves so much time and so much money. And the biggest reason why that's important is because in today's internet, where everything is highly competitive, as we've talked all show about, it's never been easier for a customer to switch. So your core economics are going to be retaining that customer.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I'm sure you see that your best customers are people who take multiple courses, people who do multiple purchases with you. And if you don't have good customer service, good onboarding, good customer support, you're man, they're going to be out really quick. And I think it's one of the things most entrepreneurs overlook early on.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
It's exactly what it is. Whether you're trying to game an algorithm, whether you're trying to make a great YouTube thumbnail, whether you're trying to buy ads on an obscure platform that maybe your industry doesn't use, but they're way cheaper. Those are all just different ways to find arbitrage and take advantage of it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
They get so obsessed with sales and bringing those customers in, they're like, oh gosh, why did like 80% of my customers leave this year? That's because I haven't been focused on it at all. I don't have any of the infrastructure to actually focus on it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Customer service is largely about setting expectations, right? Which is, do I know what I bought? Do I know what I'm going to use the thing I bought for? And do I know how I'm going to think that that's valuable? If the answer to those things are yes, then that customer is normally pretty happy. If it's no, they're going to be pretty unhappy.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And so marketing's job is to set up the value proposition early on. A sales job is to not oversell, to not make promises that the product can't keep, and to understand that customer's business enough to understand that this is how you're actually going to use this thing once you buy it. And then customer success and customer supporter, their job is to help you get onboarded and
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Get any blockers, because there's always unique things. Your business has this problem that isn't relevant to our other customers that we need to help you solve. And once you fix those problems, the customer's going to be very happy. It's normally in one of those stages where things go off the rails.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
The most helpful thing that we have done and learned over the years is we always run a monthly net promoter score survey with our customers. And so net promoter score is a question we all see, how likely are you to rank the company from one to 10? And please tell us why. And the score, kind of important. The tell us why is very important.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And the reason for that is you get a real sentiment as to what people value or like or dislike about your product. And now with AI, if you run a survey like that, you can take all of those text responses and just get the core themes very quickly. And what your job is with any customer surveying and why I think NPS is so good is to not have problems be festering and systemic.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
You always want new problems. So it's like, oh, Our customer support's back. Great, let's fix our customer support. And then you won't hear anything about customer support. You'll hear about a new thing like product speed or, oh, our client portal is tricky. You hear all these things, right?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And so I think the net promoter score question is the best because it gives you where the big root cause are. When you ask specific questions, you often get the symptoms without the root cause.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
All right. If I'm time rich and money poor, what would I do? The first thing I am doing is I am figuring out what type of creator I need to be. Am I going to be YouTube, LinkedIn? What's my product? What's my market? I got to start creating and I got to create on the daily because I'm time rich. I got the time to make every day and I got to make something every day.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I'm going to use AI tools to help me keep up the pace of production and they're free to very low cost so I can take advantage of that. Then the second thing I'm going to do is I'm going to find one area where my target audience spends a lot of time. that I might be able to reach them in a very interesting way. Like an example of this is the early days of LinkedIn groups, right?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
What you could do in the early days of LinkedIn groups is sponsor messages that the group owner could send to the entire group. And we would go and we would spend money to do that. And nobody else was doing that. And we got hugely efficient lead generation by doing that. And it's just like, oh, a million marketers in this group. Nobody is really going after them. How do we get them?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Money richer, time poorer.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Okay, if I have some resources to do this, it's not gonna be that dissimilar. I think the channels work, how I'm going to accomplish those channels. I'd probably still be a creator, but I would hire an agency to help me do all the post-production, to do the research, do all that. And I would use AI to prep.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I think there's lots of moments that make that happen. My very first job was I ran the HubSpot blog. So basically the equivalent of what you do now and what a lot of creators and amazing media companies do now, I did a long time ago because I'm old. And I think the most pivotal moment was that first year when we had a blog that had about 200,000 readers a month.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
But I would need somebody if I was time poor to tell me, oh, these topics suck, they're not working. These are the new topics we should do. They kind of give you the cheat sheet of editorial and iteration for sure. And then if you have some money, you can use programmatic ad platforms. You can use Google, you can use Meta that will give you enough money
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
baseline revenue to kind of start reinvesting. And so I would probably use YouTube ads, to be honest with you. YouTube ad targeting is great. And the cost is so much lower than Google and Facebook and Instagram that I would probably do that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
The best entrepreneurs in the world are people who just get really irritated that a problem exists and just become maniacally focused and obsessed with solving it. You could do that whether you're a solopreneur, whether you're an executive at a company, it doesn't matter. It's your job to understand what that unfair advantage is.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Start using AI. Pick a foundational model, ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, and use it every day. Once or twice a day, every day. Build the habit.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I just bought a piece of art that says, if you don't know, find out. Be endlessly curious. Be endlessly curious and ask questions. Never feel like you're stupid. Just go and ask all the questions. And if you're curious about something, just call somebody up. You'll be shocked. People will give you time. People will give you information if you care enough to know it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And then once you have that knowledge, your life is just way better in every single way.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
You can check out HubSpot.com, product, everything there. I host Marketing Against the Grain over on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts, you can check out Marketing Against the Grain.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I love that. I'm excited to have you on. We'll catch up again real soon.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Thanks, Alla.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And by the end of the year, we were at about 1.5 million monthlies. And so we were able to really grow and scale that work. And I was... maniacally focused on that for better and for worse. There are challenges with being too overtly focused and you probably don't collaborate as well with others and everything. But I knew I needed to dramatically change the trajectory of the work we were doing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And so I look at everything as like a sprint. whether it be a week, a year, two years, it's like, what do I need to really change and transform in that time? And I knew that I needed to change the type of content we're creating, the frequency, the process, all of those things that creators now do on a daily basis. But in 2010 was kind of new and people were trying to figure it out at the time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And so I think that was one. And then the other is when you go from being somebody who is contributing as an individual to like leading a team. So I went from running that blog to running all of our content and how we were, our blog, our social, our SEO, how we were scaling up. And that was a pretty pivotal transition because it's like, can I get people to follow me? Do I have a clear story?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Do I have a clear strategy? And the simple thing I would tell everybody out there is the key step in that is people need to feel like they're going to learn something from you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And so even though they may be specialists, like I would go and I would find the latest article, the latest hack that somebody had done, even if it was for somebody else on my team and I would send it to them and talk to them about it and talk about how we could use it. And they were instantly like, oh, you understand my work. You understand the craft that we're working on together here.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And I trust you to help me make my craft much better than it is today. Not that it's bad today, but that I think I can get much better with your help.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I think the best relationships are results. I think results speak for themselves and results are the ultimate meritocracy. I think the biggest thing that people get wrong is they look at what other people ask of them and say, hey, here are the goals that I think you can achieve. And they look at that as the ceiling of what they're supposed to do.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
So if you're running a LinkedIn program, for example, it's like, oh, I think you can get a million views a month this year for our company content. Great. Well, You or I, if we were in that situation, we would say, cool, you think a million's good. I think 10 million's good. How would I go and use the same constraints, everything I have access to, to do way better than you think?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Because that change in magnitude is impossible to ignore. Because then you're like, oh, wow, we have somebody who's able to overexceed what we think are fairly aggressive expectations that we would have of them. Clearly, they are able to do more and we should put them in a situation to do more.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Yeah, yeah.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Yeah, I find that people's own ambition or lack thereof is their biggest limiter to growth, not their capability, not their aptitude, not anything else. And I find those things to largely be an excuse. You're scared largely of what other people think.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
A few things. The number one thing is...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
versus what's actually true and what's actually true if you look at the market what happens is that a company no matter whether you're starting it or you're working for it they need experts and they need people who their customers look to as trusted experts and advisors who have deep knowledge and deep perspective and point of view on their market and You know how you get there?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
You have a great presence on LinkedIn. You start a podcast, you write a book, you have an email newsletter. There's tons of different ways, depending on your skills, your interests to get there, but you have to get there. And the thing that nobody tells you because I got a job at HubSpot because I had run a blog and they liked my blog.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And then I ran the blog and I host the Marketing Against the Grain podcast. Now, the thing that you know and a lot of people don't know is that when you create, when you make something every day and every week, you learn so much faster and you get so much better at your craft if you have to teach a lot of other people
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
the thing that you want them to know and the thing you're trying to be good at in your job. And I have always found on my team that the people who are out there actively creating are some of the best people in their current roles in addition to what they may be doing on LinkedIn or YouTube or wherever.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I think entrepreneurship is about solving problems. Inherently, the best entrepreneurs in the world are people who just get really irritated that a problem exists and just become maniacally focused and obsessed with solving it. And normally do so in a way that generates a lot of wealth for them and other people, right? And that's awesome.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
You could do that whether you're a solopreneur, whether you're a startup founder, whether you are a leader in a company, whether you're an executive at a company. It doesn't matter. I look at it as, am I in a situation to solve interesting problems? And the reason I don't go start a company right now is because I'm in a great position to go start and solve really interesting problems.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And I have a lot of access to capital and smart people to go and do that and make much faster progress than if I was just me trying to do something. I look at it as every situation you have an unfair advantage. It's your job to understand what that unfair advantage is. And I always tell people that when you work at a great company, you have the two things that matter most.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
You have agency and control, which is what most entrepreneurs have and they want, but you also have resources to go and do what you want with that agency and control, which a lot of entrepreneurs do not have. And so when you have both of those at the same time, regardless of the situation you're in, you should take advantage of it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I think it's a little bit what we talked about earlier. I'm an untraditional marketing leader, right? I didn't work at McKinsey. I don't have an MBA. I'm not out of central casting. I am from a small town in West Virginia where my goal was to like do interesting stuff and see the world. And when you're in that kind of situation, you just think about solving problems differently.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And that comes back to the idea of arbitrage. you have to understand if you're a marketer, what are the unique ways to reach my audience? And what are some of the ways that we have done that at HubSpot over the years, I think would help maybe bring examples of that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
First, in very early days, we created a free tool called Website Grader, where you could just put your website in and it would give the full diagnostic. So normally what you would hire a consultant for, or you talk to a sales rep for, It's just gonna give you a report on the webpage and email it to you, which in 2006, seven, eight was transformational at the time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
That's a long time ago, almost 20 years now. And we had millions and millions of people use that. Our co-founder Dharmesh built it himself, right? Like it was not like anything fancy, but it was rooted in, he watched our other co-founder Brian doing all these sales conversations and he was doing all this manual research. And he was like, I can make an app that does that for you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And then they just gave it away. And that worked really, really well. Then the second thing that worked really well for us was blogging and content in the early days of content and creating. And what we figured out is that Google search was growing rapidly and there was an arbitrage in a market inefficiency where you would search for so many things
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
back in the day and there were terrible search results, right? Like you would go and like nothing on this page is good. And if we create something, we will by far be the best thing on that topic. And we were able to grow from thousands to hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of visits doing that. We had that hypothesis, we created a process to scale it and we spent a lot of time and money.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
The other thing that people in marketing get wrong is they just, they do 10 different things kind of shitty, right? They're like, I'm spread real thin. I think I gotta do everything. You're way better off to do one to three things better than anybody else.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And if you can do one to three things better than anybody else, you can build a billion dollar company if you have one or two great marketing channels that you are world-class at. You cannot build a $10 million company if you have 10 crappy marketing channels. I've seen it time and time again, it's just how life works.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Hey, Hala. Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
The world of marketing changed a bunch with the internet. Before the internet, people remember, it was largely TV ads, billboards, direct mail, all those things. And they were all really annoying, right? Because you didn't opt into any of those things. The commercials interrupted your television when we didn't have streaming services everywhere, right?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
You'd go home and your mailbox would be full of advertisements that you didn't subscribe to or didn't want. And that was very outbound, very interruptive. And we were basically like, well, now that the internet exists, there's a whole different way to do marketing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
You can do it in an inbound way where you create content and pull people in through search engines, through social media, through email marketing, through things that people opt into and want to participate in. And that was now seems obvious because it's how the internet works, but 20 years ago was fairly revolutionary. So we created a new category.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I didn't work at McKinsey. I don't have an MBA. I'm an untraditional marketing leader. Marketing is a game of arbitrage. The best marketers in the world just figure out where there are inefficiencies, where things are underpriced. They lean very aggressively into those things to get a really high return.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I think accelerating a business career growth, it's all very similar. I think it's about how do you really focus on the small set of things that are gonna give you the high magnitude of return? I think so often people get caught up in operational details or let everybody else push their priorities on them, where you have to be like, you have to look at the situation and say,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And sometimes if you're in marketing or if you're an entrepreneur and you're starting a company, The best thing you can do is, there's a great quote out there, better is a debate, different is a choice. When you force somebody to make a choice and you do that by creating a new category where it's like, hey, do you wanna do this new awesome inbound thing that works really great?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Or do you wanna do that old stodgy outbound thing that everybody hates? We tell that story and people are like, oh, I wanna do the new cool thing that people like. I don't wanna do the old bad thing that everybody hates. But if we had just said, oh, like, hey, we can help you do your direct mail a little bit better. Who cares? Well, maybe it's good enough. Do I really even need better?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I don't know what you're talking about, right? And so painting a clear choice for your target audience is so powerful. It takes a little bit longer, right? Because people aren't familiar with it. There's a level of education that you have to do, but anybody can do it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And if you're in it for a long haul, if you think you have a big opportunity and your business is a five, 10, 20 year thing, then it's a really important thing to take advantage of to actually be differentiated in the market.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Oh, yeah. It's a great question. What works in marketing in 2025? A few things. Creators. Working, partnering, or being with creators and these modern media companies like you run, Hala. Huge opportunity. Huge, huge opportunity there. We work deeply with creators. I'm a creator myself. It works. YouTube. YouTube works. YouTube is an exceptional channel to drive awareness and monetization.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
It is much harder to disrupt through artificial intelligence, which is kind of the thing that's changing marketing the most. Blogging still works. It does. But it works for... the very focused universe of the industry you solve, where you have unique data, unique insight, unique credibility, you can get that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
You can't go and talk about everything in the world and get search traffic, but you can focus on your core niche and get a good baseline audience through blogging. Those things are completely working. Partnering with creators, even through advertising means, hugely, hugely valuable. The other thing that's working,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
A lot of people are doing events and in person because we've gotten so segmented, no shared experiences. I think if you're selling high, big ticket, expensive things, bringing people together in person is becoming something that all the marketers I talk to are spending more money on this year, not less money on.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I have a rule that I don't make anything without being clear on how I'm going to get it distributed and what the distribution advantages are. I think Substack, if you're an entrepreneur, has a little bit of built-in audience, but it's not worth it because the bigger built-in audience is information discovery. And I say that kind of broader than search.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And so if I were starting today and it was just me, you and I were starting a company, we were going to go out and do something. I would start a blog on my website for a couple of reasons. One, a ton of people still use Google search. And you still can get a lot of traffic from Google search.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
What are the three to five things that if I do, I will be 10 times more successful than anybody else in the situation? And that sounds simple, but it is the thing that I think matters the most.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
The second thing is people are using AI for discovery, chat GPT search, Google deep research, grok, all these things and perplexity. And what we have seen is that Text-based content and video-based content that's cited in those results still gets a real amount of traffic. I host a podcast called Marketing Against the Grain. We did a video on DeepSeek when DeepSeek first came out.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And it got recommended on everybody's chat GPT queries on DeepSeek. And we got... 50,000 views in like 24 hours because everybody was searching for it and we had a really good credible thing. And so it's almost like the distribution for text and video is getting better. What's changing is that it's a little less attributable, right?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Because if somebody is getting it in like chat GPT or perplexity, they may be reading information and see your link, but they might not directly click back to it. proportion are, but a much smaller portion than historically in Google. But you're still getting the awareness, the distribution, the brand recognition for being like a credible resource in those things.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And that's why I think you have to have a pretty healthy blog and YouTube strategy to surface in all these new models.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And by the way, there's compounding benefits to all this, right? Like, if I get discovered in ChatGPT and I get really good engagement on my video, then YouTube's going to be like, oh, this is clearly a good video, so I'm going to prioritize it more in YouTube search.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And then you get more in the YouTube algorithm and the YouTube search engine, and then you have a video that completely takes off because of it, and that's awesome.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
So competitive, right?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Here's my advice on content creation day. First, people have never wanted more actionable content ever. They don't just wanna learn something. They want something that's gonna lead them to immediately take action. And so anytime you're creating content that's gonna allow people to immediately take action,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
that they can take, especially like in free tools or free platforms, that's going to take off. It's going to go great. I see that all the time. I imagine you see that all the time. That is clearly a trend that is happening. The second thing people want is unique data and perspective. If you have a survey of 2000 people in a given industry, people are going to check it out.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Because they wanna know, benchmark, they wanna see how they're doing, they're competitive, they wanna compare themselves, all that stuff happens, right? And so you are gonna see that be a real standout thing. And so that's where proprietary research, customer data, things like that are a huge leverage. And then the third is, can you be really contrarian and have a good argument?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Can you go against the status quo and change people's thinking with a real deep and thoughtful reasoned argument about something? And if you can do that, you're also going to get people's attention. What would you add? You're doing this all the time. What'd I miss?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
The prompt I've always given myself is, is what I'm about to do going to be 10 times more valuable for people? Or would somebody pay $1,000, $2,000 to have access to this? And if the answer to one of those two questions is yes, it's going to be really successful.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And if the answer's no, it's probably going to be middling in average.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I think the first entrepreneurship thing I had, I would go to Sam's Club and Walmart and find clearance items and flip them on eBay when I was in high school. And so I was always somebody who was obsessed with arbitrage. How do you buy low and sell high? And where are the inefficiencies of a market? And... One of the great things about marketing is that marketing is a game of arbitrage.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Email is super important. And here's why email is super important from like a principle base. It's one of the few channels you actually control. There's not an algorithm. Somebody gives you permission to email them and you get to send them a message and you actually own that email address. Somebody can't come along and change the Google algorithm, the YouTube algorithm, the LinkedIn algorithm.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I know people are all up in arms about LinkedIn algorithm changes recently. And so that's the real value of email marketing is that you have way more ownership and control of email marketing than most other channels out there. And so once you kind of have that foundation, you're like, okay, email marketing still matters. What am I going to do?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And the number one thing you're going to do is to have as highly personalized email as possible. And that's writing your emails with AI. So one of the things we did at HubSpot is we have what's called HubSpot Academy, which teaches you how to do marketing, how to use our software, all of those things. And there's a bunch of different courses on HubSpot Academy.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And we basically, when people come into HubSpot and maybe consume a article or a free guide or a webinar or what have you, we'll then send a follow-up email that is custom, one-on-one, written from them by AI, and that we recommend based on everything we know about them, the content they've consumed, what the best course for them to take is.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Not only do we mention their business, but we have puns, like AI has gotten very good at that. And it feels like a human researches company and wrote them an email. And that email converts 80 to 100% better than our normal emails.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And so that is number one, anything you can do to better personalize your email and make it relevant to their problem and their experience with your company and your website, you are going to get much, much better results.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Look, you give them the great ways to do that, which is offer something really valuable that you consider charging money for. Remember that marketing is kind of a lesson in economics. It's what do you want to sell versus what do you want to give away to sell a bigger thing down the road? And how do you offset how you think about that?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And so for me, the things that are really good, if you have any free tools, great. If you have any templates, like you do the work of building out a big Excel sheet with formulas and everything that people could just drop their own data in. they will give you an email address for that. I promise you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
One of the things that worked really well at HubSpot back in the day, and you can do similar versions of this now, is we would find our customers always needed stock photography and imagery for their email newsletters, their landing page.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And I was like, well, what if we just hire a freelance photographer, buy the rights out for like $10,000 to 500 different pictures, and we just give those away for free instead of them having to pay Getty Images or all these people. And I think over the years, we've had like 5 million downloads. I can't even tell you how popular that has been.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
But it's looking at your market, thinking about something that they do that they spend money on and say, hey, can I give that to them for free? And if you can, you will get whatever information you want in exchange for them saving that money.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
The best marketers in the world just figure out where there are inefficiencies, where things are underpriced. They lean very aggressively into those things to get a really high return.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
About 10 years ago, we were like, hey, you know what? The world is changing and trust is becoming the most important thing. And one of the ways you can build trust with people is to let them try before they buy. And like your webinar is a great example of that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
It's like, hey, if I'm on a 30, 60 minute webinar with you, I probably have a pretty good idea about what your course is gonna look like, what the quality is gonna be, what it's gonna feel like, the experience. And so I'm much more likely to have trust and go buy that course.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
So if you use our free version of HubSpot CRM, you're much more likely to buy a paid version because you're like, hey, you know what? I'm up and running on this. I've closed a couple of deals with it. I understand the features that if I pay for them that I would get. And you know what? I kind of need them because I think I would make even more money if I paid for those features.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And it's a whole different... game. Right now, we all have access to infinite knowledge with AI. Knowledge is a complete commodity. So in that world, trust becomes everything. People can know who you are, but they can still not trust you at all. And giving that value away is how you build trust. And so for us, the free version of our product, so we do it, but you have webinars.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And so what happens when you go and then work at a startup at the time, I think HubSpot was about 100 people when I joined, you go from just running really fast by yourself to needing to run really fast with a bunch of other people. And that's the biggest change. And you have to adopt a different mindset. And I think the mindset there is, I have limited scale, just me.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
There is a version of that for any business, is I think what I would say.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I have a Maxim I live by and its distribution is undefeated. If you can get a big audience, you can always figure out how to make money on it. The inverse is not true. You could have an expensive product and sell it to a few people, or you can have a big audience and sell it to a lot, lot more people, but it's gonna take a little bit of time.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
It's a different way of thinking, but distribution is the biggest reason most businesses don't grow because they just don't have a big enough audience, universe of people who actually care about them and the thing that they're offering in the world.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I could accomplish much bigger things if I do it with other people, but I got to bring them along for that journey. If I just try to push my agenda on everybody else, nobody's going to understand. They're not going to have the context and we're not going to go anywhere. And so I think the biggest shift from being somebody who is working solo or on a small team to being on a bigger team is that
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
So if you think about CRM, there's lots of views of what CRMs are, but what they really are is a single source of truth for your customers and your prospects. So instead of your support team working out of a project management system, sales reps working out of spreadsheets, all of those things, everybody, your marketers, your sellers, your customer service folks, all working together.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Updating one record, all the context in one place, and then being able to do really powerful things, whether it be advertising, email marketing, marketing automation, sales call prep, sales follow-up, sales automation, all of those things. That's what you're talking about doing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And you're going to see CRM be way more important over the next couple of years because what's going to happen with CRM over the next even year is that all the unstructured data, your meeting recordings, the emails you exchange, all of those things things, all that context are going to make it way better. Your CRM is just going to generate the email follow-up to your meeting for you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And it's like, oh, great. I know I need to follow up from this meeting, but I've got to go run to this other meeting right now. Well, it's great. I can do it in 30 seconds versus having to do it 15 minutes tonight when I've forgotten half the things and need to go look them up, right? And that is why CRM is so important. It also
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
is when you have all your data in one place, you can do real reporting and actually understand what's working and what's not working. And as somebody who has helped grow a business from tens of millions of dollars to billions of dollars, it's done through basic iteration over a long period of time, finding problems, solving them and building and iterating.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And you can't do that without your data in one place and some clear reporting.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
How do you actually clearly articulate the problem you're going to solve in a way that people are really excited to solve it with you? Because when you're a solopreneur, you don't have to do that. You can just do what's in your head and go.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
tons, tons of AI agents. So first of all, the most used AI features at HubSpot, one is to prep for sales meetings. So we have a co-pilot where it just will take everything from a contact record and give you the full prep summary. That's awesome. We have an agent called Content Remix. So like, let's say you're going to run a content campaign. You're going to do an email newsletter.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Let's say you're going to do a webinar. You're going to do a webinar. It will spin up the landing page, the email, the ad assets, everything for you and does all the manual work in the background. And then we also have a product that our co-founder at our mesh started called agent.ai, which is a marketplace of agents where you can go and anybody can build or use different agents.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
It's kind of like, a modern automation marketplace where if you have a problem, you can either use Agent.ai to build it or somebody's already built it and you can just use their agent. Like a really good example is there's a company research agent that will give you like a McKinsey analyst level kind of deep detail briefing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Who's the CEO, funding history, core products, competitors, the whole thing. And it'll do it in like two minutes, right? Perfectly formatted for free. That is just a game changer when it comes to agents.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I would pick one AI tool and get really good at it. And for marketers, that's probably Claude. For sellers, that's probably ChatGPT. And you're gonna use those tools. The reason I say Claude has the best taste, it's really good at writing. You can upload to projects in Claude and have really great specific, highly repeatable writing output that's core to marketing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
For sellers, I think one of the best AI features that exists on the planet is ChatGPT's deep research feature, where you can have it go and just build a incredibly complex research report. And it might research a problem for five, 10, 20 minutes with all these different agents in the background going and doing that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And you having the full map to an industry, the accounts within the industry, how your product maps, the core competitors in that industry, those things become super valuable. So that's where I would focus if I was just like feeling overwhelmed and not yet started.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
A few things. So one of the other agents we have is called our customer agent, and it basically helps resolve customer support. Like the average HubSpot customer solves 30% of their support questions are answered by AI or answered by our agent. And so that's 30% less support people, support time, founder time, depending on the size and scale of company that you have to spend.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And if you focus on it, we've seen customers get to like 50, 60% deflection, which is huge, saves so much time and so much money. And the biggest reason why that's important is because in today's internet, where everything is highly competitive, as we've talked all show about, it's never been easier for a customer to switch. So your core economics are going to be retaining that customer.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I'm sure you see that your best customers are people who take multiple courses, people who do multiple purchases with you. And if you don't have good customer service, good onboarding, good customer support, you're man, they're going to be out really quick. And I think it's one of the things most entrepreneurs overlook early on.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
It's exactly what it is. Whether you're trying to game an algorithm, whether you're trying to make a great YouTube thumbnail, whether you're trying to buy ads on an obscure platform that maybe your industry doesn't use, but they're way cheaper. Those are all just different ways to find arbitrage and take advantage of it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
They get so obsessed with sales and bringing those customers in, they're like, oh gosh, why did like 80% of my customers leave this year? That's because I haven't been focused on it at all. I don't have any of the infrastructure to actually focus on it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Customer service is largely about setting expectations, right? Which is, do I know what I bought? Do I know what I'm going to use the thing I bought for? And do I know how I'm going to think that that's valuable? If the answer to those things are yes, then that customer is normally pretty happy. If it's no, they're going to be pretty unhappy.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And so marketing's job is to set up the value proposition early on. A sales job is to not oversell, to not make promises that the product can't keep, and to understand that customer's business enough to understand that this is how you're actually going to use this thing once you buy it. And then customer success and customer supporter, their job is to help you get onboarded and
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Get any blockers, because there's always unique things. Your business has this problem that isn't relevant to our other customers that we need to help you solve. And once you fix those problems, the customer's going to be very happy. It's normally in one of those stages where things go off the rails.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
The most helpful thing that we have done and learned over the years is we always run a monthly net promoter score survey with our customers. And so net promoter score is a question we all see, how likely are you to rank the company from one to 10? And please tell us why. And the score, kind of important. The tell us why is very important.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And the reason for that is you get a real sentiment as to what people value or like or dislike about your product. And now with AI, if you run a survey like that, you can take all of those text responses and just get the core themes very quickly. And what your job is with any customer surveying and why I think NPS is so good is to not have problems be festering and systemic.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
You always want new problems. So it's like, oh, Our customer support's back. Great, let's fix our customer support. And then you won't hear anything about customer support. You'll hear about a new thing like product speed or, oh, our client portal is tricky. You hear all these things, right?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And so I think the net promoter score question is the best because it gives you where the big root cause are. When you ask specific questions, you often get the symptoms without the root cause.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
All right. If I'm time rich and money poor, what would I do? The first thing I am doing is I am figuring out what type of creator I need to be. Am I going to be YouTube, LinkedIn? What's my product? What's my market? I got to start creating and I got to create on the daily because I'm time rich. I got the time to make every day and I got to make something every day.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I'm going to use AI tools to help me keep up the pace of production and they're free to very low cost so I can take advantage of that. Then the second thing I'm going to do is I'm going to find one area where my target audience spends a lot of time. that I might be able to reach them in a very interesting way. Like an example of this is the early days of LinkedIn groups, right?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
What you could do in the early days of LinkedIn groups is sponsor messages that the group owner could send to the entire group. And we would go and we would spend money to do that. And nobody else was doing that. And we got hugely efficient lead generation by doing that. And it's just like, oh, a million marketers in this group. Nobody is really going after them. How do we get them?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Money richer, time poorer.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Okay, if I have some resources to do this, it's not gonna be that dissimilar. I think the channels work, how I'm going to accomplish those channels. I'd probably still be a creator, but I would hire an agency to help me do all the post-production, to do the research, do all that. And I would use AI to prep.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I think there's lots of moments that make that happen. My very first job was I ran the HubSpot blog. So basically the equivalent of what you do now and what a lot of creators and amazing media companies do now, I did a long time ago because I'm old. And I think the most pivotal moment was that first year when we had a blog that had about 200,000 readers a month.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
But I would need somebody if I was time poor to tell me, oh, these topics suck, they're not working. These are the new topics we should do. They kind of give you the cheat sheet of editorial and iteration for sure. And then if you have some money, you can use programmatic ad platforms. You can use Google, you can use Meta that will give you enough money
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
baseline revenue to kind of start reinvesting. And so I would probably use YouTube ads, to be honest with you. YouTube ad targeting is great. And the cost is so much lower than Google and Facebook and Instagram that I would probably do that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
The best entrepreneurs in the world are people who just get really irritated that a problem exists and just become maniacally focused and obsessed with solving it. You could do that whether you're a solopreneur, whether you're an executive at a company, it doesn't matter. It's your job to understand what that unfair advantage is.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Start using AI. Pick a foundational model, ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, and use it every day. Once or twice a day, every day. Build the habit.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I just bought a piece of art that says, if you don't know, find out. Be endlessly curious. Be endlessly curious and ask questions. Never feel like you're stupid. Just go and ask all the questions. And if you're curious about something, just call somebody up. You'll be shocked. People will give you time. People will give you information if you care enough to know it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And then once you have that knowledge, your life is just way better in every single way.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
You can check out HubSpot.com, product, everything there. I host Marketing Against the Grain over on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts, you can check out Marketing Against the Grain.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I love that. I'm excited to have you on. We'll catch up again real soon.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Thanks, Alla.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And by the end of the year, we were at about 1.5 million monthlies. And so we were able to really grow and scale that work. And I was... maniacally focused on that for better and for worse. There are challenges with being too overtly focused and you probably don't collaborate as well with others and everything. But I knew I needed to dramatically change the trajectory of the work we were doing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And so I look at everything as like a sprint. whether it be a week, a year, two years, it's like, what do I need to really change and transform in that time? And I knew that I needed to change the type of content we're creating, the frequency, the process, all of those things that creators now do on a daily basis. But in 2010 was kind of new and people were trying to figure it out at the time.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And so I think that was one. And then the other is when you go from being somebody who is contributing as an individual to like leading a team. So I went from running that blog to running all of our content and how we were, our blog, our social, our SEO, how we were scaling up. And that was a pretty pivotal transition because it's like, can I get people to follow me? Do I have a clear story?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Do I have a clear strategy? And the simple thing I would tell everybody out there is the key step in that is people need to feel like they're going to learn something from you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And so even though they may be specialists, like I would go and I would find the latest article, the latest hack that somebody had done, even if it was for somebody else on my team and I would send it to them and talk to them about it and talk about how we could use it. And they were instantly like, oh, you understand my work. You understand the craft that we're working on together here.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And I trust you to help me make my craft much better than it is today. Not that it's bad today, but that I think I can get much better with your help.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I think the best relationships are results. I think results speak for themselves and results are the ultimate meritocracy. I think the biggest thing that people get wrong is they look at what other people ask of them and say, hey, here are the goals that I think you can achieve. And they look at that as the ceiling of what they're supposed to do.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
So if you're running a LinkedIn program, for example, it's like, oh, I think you can get a million views a month this year for our company content. Great. Well, You or I, if we were in that situation, we would say, cool, you think a million's good. I think 10 million's good. How would I go and use the same constraints, everything I have access to, to do way better than you think?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Because that change in magnitude is impossible to ignore. Because then you're like, oh, wow, we have somebody who's able to overexceed what we think are fairly aggressive expectations that we would have of them. Clearly, they are able to do more and we should put them in a situation to do more.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Yeah, yeah.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
Yeah, I find that people's own ambition or lack thereof is their biggest limiter to growth, not their capability, not their aptitude, not anything else. And I find those things to largely be an excuse. You're scared largely of what other people think.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
A few things. The number one thing is...
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
versus what's actually true and what's actually true if you look at the market what happens is that a company no matter whether you're starting it or you're working for it they need experts and they need people who their customers look to as trusted experts and advisors who have deep knowledge and deep perspective and point of view on their market and You know how you get there?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
You have a great presence on LinkedIn. You start a podcast, you write a book, you have an email newsletter. There's tons of different ways, depending on your skills, your interests to get there, but you have to get there. And the thing that nobody tells you because I got a job at HubSpot because I had run a blog and they liked my blog.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And then I ran the blog and I host the Marketing Against the Grain podcast. Now, the thing that you know and a lot of people don't know is that when you create, when you make something every day and every week, you learn so much faster and you get so much better at your craft if you have to teach a lot of other people
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
the thing that you want them to know and the thing you're trying to be good at in your job. And I have always found on my team that the people who are out there actively creating are some of the best people in their current roles in addition to what they may be doing on LinkedIn or YouTube or wherever.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I think entrepreneurship is about solving problems. Inherently, the best entrepreneurs in the world are people who just get really irritated that a problem exists and just become maniacally focused and obsessed with solving it. And normally do so in a way that generates a lot of wealth for them and other people, right? And that's awesome.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
You could do that whether you're a solopreneur, whether you're a startup founder, whether you are a leader in a company, whether you're an executive at a company. It doesn't matter. I look at it as, am I in a situation to solve interesting problems? And the reason I don't go start a company right now is because I'm in a great position to go start and solve really interesting problems.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And I have a lot of access to capital and smart people to go and do that and make much faster progress than if I was just me trying to do something. I look at it as every situation you have an unfair advantage. It's your job to understand what that unfair advantage is. And I always tell people that when you work at a great company, you have the two things that matter most.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
You have agency and control, which is what most entrepreneurs have and they want, but you also have resources to go and do what you want with that agency and control, which a lot of entrepreneurs do not have. And so when you have both of those at the same time, regardless of the situation you're in, you should take advantage of it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
I think it's a little bit what we talked about earlier. I'm an untraditional marketing leader, right? I didn't work at McKinsey. I don't have an MBA. I'm not out of central casting. I am from a small town in West Virginia where my goal was to like do interesting stuff and see the world. And when you're in that kind of situation, you just think about solving problems differently.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And that comes back to the idea of arbitrage. you have to understand if you're a marketer, what are the unique ways to reach my audience? And what are some of the ways that we have done that at HubSpot over the years, I think would help maybe bring examples of that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
First, in very early days, we created a free tool called Website Grader, where you could just put your website in and it would give the full diagnostic. So normally what you would hire a consultant for, or you talk to a sales rep for, It's just gonna give you a report on the webpage and email it to you, which in 2006, seven, eight was transformational at the time.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
That's a long time ago, almost 20 years now. And we had millions and millions of people use that. Our co-founder Dharmesh built it himself, right? Like it was not like anything fancy, but it was rooted in, he watched our other co-founder Brian doing all these sales conversations and he was doing all this manual research. And he was like, I can make an app that does that for you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And then they just gave it away. And that worked really, really well. Then the second thing that worked really well for us was blogging and content in the early days of content and creating. And what we figured out is that Google search was growing rapidly and there was an arbitrage in a market inefficiency where you would search for so many things
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
back in the day and there were terrible search results, right? Like you would go and like nothing on this page is good. And if we create something, we will by far be the best thing on that topic. And we were able to grow from thousands to hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of visits doing that. We had that hypothesis, we created a process to scale it and we spent a lot of time and money.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
The other thing that people in marketing get wrong is they just, they do 10 different things kind of shitty, right? They're like, I'm spread real thin. I think I gotta do everything. You're way better off to do one to three things better than anybody else.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348
And if you can do one to three things better than anybody else, you can build a billion dollar company if you have one or two great marketing channels that you are world-class at. You cannot build a $10 million company if you have 10 crappy marketing channels. I've seen it time and time again, it's just how life works.