The Smarketing Blog: Sales, Marketing and the Customer Experience

Using Inbound Marketing to Market Smarter Online - Part II

  

 Email Article  

Tweet  

  

 delicious  

  

This was a guest post from Stacie Chalmers.

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