5 Questions With...Mark Keaney, Greater Media Boston

Learning from your peers is one of the best ways to see if you should get started with inbound marketing, or whether you're on the right path to building a solid lead generation strategy

That's why we started the "5 Questions With..." series. On today's edition, we got to hear from Mark Keaney, Director of Sales for Greater Media Boston.

1. When did you get started with inbound marketing and what was the biggest factor in your reasoning to get started?

We hosted an event for our sales team and simply shared these amazing “live and local” success stories with our team. Story after story of clients who had incredible results with the programs our team had created. We decided we needed a website that would bring them to life. In the process of building our site and researching how to use social media to promote our business – we discovered “inbound marketing.”

See also: 7 Decisions to Make Before Starting Inbound Marketing

2. What has been your biggest challenge with inbound marketing and how were you able to overcome it?

Time. To do it right, you need time, resources, and people. Working with an outside consultancy helped us get started – LeadG2 has been great! For us to take it to the next level, we need to expand our internal work group and have more people focused on generating content.

See also: Is it Time for a Remodel of your Inbound Marketing Plan?

3. Where do you feel you've seen the most success with inbound marketing?

Internal communication and industry attention are the two areas of added benefit that I don’t think we expected. Our team sees that we are industry leaders doing innovative things and taking a different approach to bringing our company to market. At an industry event, we got a lot of positive feedback about our blog. People were saying, “You guys are everywhere!” It felt good to be recognized as industry leaders who were not only promoting our company, but providing a resource for information on marketing in Boston.

See also: 5 Ways to Position Yourself as a Thought Leader

4. How has inbound marketing changed the way you market your brand or the way you approach marketing in general?

As an industry, we do very little to market our business. Our station’s market their brands to consumers, but we do very little to let businesses know how a radio company can help them grow their business. We have been able to showcase our brands; our difference; our live-and-local approach; and all of the different product offerings from digital to event marketing to the effectiveness of radio advertising.

See also: 6 Inbound Marketing Lessons We've Learned Since We Started LeadG2

5. What advice would you give to someone new to inbound marketing?

Take 90 days to build your plan and 90 days to soft-launch your Inbound Marketing plan. Look at it as a one-year plan to success – not overnight. In the first six months, you build the plan and the content and get an A-team in place to help get it off the ground. You need a team of great people for a successful launch. We had three stakeholders in our company who I credit for all of the success we have up until this point. They own it! Now we’d like to expand that team to drive results and more support and collaboration.  

See also: Five Characteristics of an Inbound Marketing Culture

Catch up on the rest of the series:

• 5 Questions With... Bill Fries, CEO of Hiregy
• 5 Questions With... Matt Mills, WTOP
• 5 Questions With... Matt Sunshine, President, LeadG2
• 5 Questions With... Piper Walker, The Weather Channel
• 5 Questions With...Sheryl Vieira, Caldwell Trust
• 5 Questions with... LeadG2's Very Own Brian Hasenbauer