The Smarketing Blog: Sales, Marketing and the Customer Experience

Using Inbound Marketing to Market Smarter Online - Part I

  

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This was a guest post from Stacie Chalmers.

The term "inbound marketing" is the process of attracting prospects to your company.  In relation to today's technology this means using the search engines and social media to drive traffic to your website. 

Examples of inbound marketing:

• Search Engine Optimization
• Social Media
• Blogging
• Email marketing - opt in lists
• PPC

The comparison is ‘outbound marketing' which is the process of pushing your message to consumers.

Examples of outbound marketing:

• Trade Shows
• Telemarketing
• Direct mail

Hubspot recently conducted a report on The State of Inbound Marketing. The purpose of the report was to understand the current usage and results of inbound marketing to help business owners and marketers. Three of the key findings were:

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

In my next blog I'm going to summarize the findings and simplify what business owners and marketers need to be doing to generate more leads and reduce their cost per lead. To make sure you don't miss out subscribe to this blog today!