November 4, 2016 – Samantha Alford, industry leader and one of the most sought-after Inbound Marketing experts today, has recently given her thoughts on the power of combining Inbound marketing with the recurring revenue of membership sites in an interview after her presentation at the annual DiG conference in Newcastle, Australia. Alford provides a valuable context both to how Inbound has changed the marketing industry for the better over the last several years and how businesses who want to lead their industry and grow in a scalable and predictable way will need to incorporate a membership site to start building and influencing their community moving forward.

Alford indicated that, in her experience, there is one major differentiator for businesses moving forward, and that is leadership.  She said there are three major elements that are critical to standing out as a leader in any industry.  These three elements are Inbound Marketing, the creation of a community virtual home base (or membership site), and the belief in a greater purpose for your industry.

Alford argues that Inbound marketing is about more than selling your wares. It’s about creating thought leadership, education and inspiration for your industry’s customer base. By providing these through content creation on a blog, video content or podcast (among other platforms), businesses attract followers who share the same higher order ideals, and these followers prefer to deal with industry leaders to fulfil their needs.

Alford says that once businesses have attracted new interest through Inbound marketing, industry leaders are creating a community or ‘tribe’ virtual home base to continue the conversation with their customers. This creates greater loyalty and mutual support moving forward. “67% of customers leave a business and purchase from someone else because of indifference” Alford said in her presentation.  “The winning businesses are finding ways to better engage with their customers on a regular basis to help solve their ongoing needs, which in turn leads to upsell and cross-sell opportunities”.

Alford said that the power of Inbound marketing to attract new customers is well established now.  The interest in it is so great that over 15,000 business owners and marketers are converging in Boston this week for the annual #INBOUND16 conference.  With a lineup of speakers like Gary Vaynerchuck, Alec Baldwin, Serena Williams and many more big names, the conference keynotes and breakouts are going to be full of practical evidence of Inbound’s impact on the marketing discipline.

The value of recurring revenue from membership site models is also well documented. In her book “The Membership Economy”, Robbie Kellman Baxter says that “Organizations that build their businesses around people’s needs to belong, to be connected, and to be admired, that are focussed on relationships over products are winning in today’s economy”.

In the interview Alford said that historically there had been one big road block to leveraging the benefits of both Inbound marketing and membership sites. “In the past there hasn’t been a system that seamlessly integrated the specialized Inbound marketing applications like HubSpot and the membership site platforms that are mostly built on WordPress websites.  So we built one”, Alford said.

Alford’s company Inbound Addons has recently released their newest product: Inbound Member. Inbound Member goes above and beyond the benefits associated with a standard WordPress membership site plugin by offering native integration with HubSpot.

“Now HubSpot customers have an easy to use tool that extends the application and allows them to leverage the benefits of Inbound, as well as seamlessly building their ‘tribe’ at the same time”, Alford said.

To find out more information about the  #INBOUND16 conference, please visit that organization’s official website at http://www.inbound.com. To find out more information about Inbound Member, or about any of the other products that Inbound Addons has made available, visit the company’s official website at https://inboundaddons.com.

###