Internet Marketing- It's Still Marketing

Using Inbound Marketing to Market Smarter Online - Part II

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In my last Inbound Marketing blog I talked about Hubspot's State of Inbound Marketing Report, which had the following three key findings:

1. Organizations using Inbound marketing strategies to generate leads have a 60% lower cost per lead than organizations who use traditional outbound marketing strategies to generate leads
2. Social media and blogs are the most rapidly expanding category in the overall marketing budget
3. Businesses are generating real customers with social media and blogs

What you need to be doing to generate more leads and reduce your cost per lead.

1. The two most cost effective ways to generate leads are:
1. social media
2. blogs.
2. Inbound marketing budgets are increasing whilst outbound marketing budgets are decreasing.
1. Inbound marketing channels are defined collectively as: PPC, social media, seo and blogs.
2. Outbound marketing channels are defined collectively as: trade shows, direct mail and telemarketing.
3. Inbound marketing channels were identified as more important than outbound, and compared with 2009's report social media, blogs and seo were identified as more important in 2010 than 2009 as a marketing channel.
4. The one inbound marketing channel that decreased in importance is PPC.
5. Email marketing which can be either inbound or outbound was also rated as an important marketing channel for 2010.
6. The major factor for businesses increasing their inbound marketing budget in 2010 is because of past success with inbound marketing.
7. Small business is more likely to spend more of their budget on inbound marketing than medium or large firms. This is the same for both B2B and B2C
8. The top most important social media channels for business in 2010, in order are:
1. Company blog
2. Twitter
3. Facebook
4. Linked In
5. YouTube
9. On average 40% of companies reported getting a customer from; company blog, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
1. B2B was higher with LinkedIn at 45%
2. B2C was higher with Facebook at 68%
10. Frequency of blog is directly linked to customer acquisition.
1. 90% of companies that blog daily acquired a customer, compared with:
2. 38% of companies that blog monthly acquiring a customer
3. A weekly blog is the most common frequency and is up in 2010 compared to 2009.

The take away for business owners and marketers. 

If you're looking to increase leads, remain competitive and decrease your cost per lead you have to:

1. Get started with a company blog, LinkedIn (B2B), Facebook (B2C) and Twitter (B2C and B2B)
2. Blog as often as you can, at least weekly

If you don't have the time, or you haven't seen results spend some money and hire an inbound marketing consultant to help you.

If you're interested in learning more about this research: The State of Inbound Marketing

This was a guest post from Stacie Chalmers an Inbound Marketing Consultant and HubSpot  partner. She has been involved with marketing since the dinosaur and has graduated from the Inbound Marketing University as a Certified Inbound Marketer. You can read her blogs at Stacie's Inbound Marketing Blog.  Originally from Australia, Stacie spent 2 years living in Maine before recently moving to the warmer climate of Florida. However she still maintains her support for Red Sox, Patriots and Bruins !

Redefining Success-Moving Beyond the Click

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If you still think that your online marketing success is defined by the number of visitors to your website, your click-through-rate (CTR) for your paid campaigns, or the open rate for your email campaigns then you may be missing a very large piece to the puzzle.

I often find myself telling people that optimization, (whether it is search engine optimization, business optimization, conversion optimization- same concept applies) is a long term strategy and process, not a one time project or campaign. So often I hear clients asking to optimize a web page, a PPC campaign, and they never move beyond that into true online business optimization.

It will not only require careful planning, detailed implementation, measurement, analysis and improvement- it also requires the commitment of the business owner or executives to see and understand the larger picture. Yes, there will be short term successes on the way- but do not stop there to see the real ROI.

Optimization should (at the very least) address these areas:

• Maximize the quality (and quantity) of leads delivered to sales.
• Measure online and offline campaign results based on sales metrics beyond the lead.
• Align sales and marketing so that the messaging matches the customer experience.
• Increase conversion rates on key marketing initiatives.
• Understand not only who did what and where it was done but also why it may have happened.

With average campaign conversion rates anywhere from 2-10 percent, the vast majority of your visitorsare simply not converting to customers. Somewhere in the sales process they bail out- where and most importantly-why?
If you're only measuring visitors, click-through rates, open rates, and the like you have no means to identify and plug these leaks in the conversion funnel. This represents a huge untapped opportunity and money being left on the table. To tap into this opportunity it will require not only the right tools to measure, but also the expert knowledge to leverage the numbers to make improvements through testing and implementation.

What will you optimize for your business? Can you afford not to?