A Marketing Process Providing The Proof In The Pudding
There is no doubt that marketing your products and services online has it’s advantages. What kind of marketing process have you identified as being successful? Are you using inbound or outbound marketing – or both?
Recently, a leading inbound marketing software company called Hubspot released an independent study of theirs called State of Inbound 2014. The study states that “we look at more than 3,500 marketing and sales professionals at virtually all levels, across all industries and around the world. We asked what they do, why they do it, how they do it, and if it’s working. This report is more than survey data.”
Here are 3 key takeaways from this report:
PRIMARY LEAD SOURCE BY INBOUND/OUTBOUND
Looking at the chart, we can see that early in 2011, outbound marketing efforts were low compared to the trending of inbound marketing efforts. At the time, the shift in content marketing was taking front-stage in a surge of efforts to bring inbound marketing as a principle player. What we can also see is a variance in how each of the two marketing processes have changed. Today, this study indicates that, although inbound marketing experienced a drop in the beginning of 2012 and again in 2014 it has remained a higher value to marketers since 2011. More importantly, traditional outbound marketing has seen an all time low in its impact to marketers since before 2011.
WHICH LEAD SOURCES HAVE BECOME MORE IMPORTANT: INBOUND VS. OUTBOUND
Finding leads and closing them is the way we want it to work. This process gets affected when the quality of leads drop. How can we close leads if the leads marketing produce are not ready to convert as a customer? The reason for the conversion rates being affected is a lack of knowledge of your product or service. Traditional outbound methods struggle to make a connection that inform and educate the consumer. We can see in this sampling that the better and more knowledgeable lead sources came from inbound marketing methods. Those that had no knowledge at all came from (not surprising) outbound marketing.
INBOUND ROI IMPACT – YOY
The “C suite” executive is mainly interested in understanding how all of this ties into their investment dollar. Marketing processes have to do a better job of identifying an ROI goal and producing marketing methods that can report to that goal. Inbound marketing processes that are set up correctly will report a greater ROI because it does a better job of tracking and measuring content performance.
The value in today’s marketing is in the process. There is no doubt your website is attractive and well organized or that you have volumes of content you can’t wait to share. However, if you don’t have a proven tracking system in place to deliver tracking and predictable results for your marketing content and leads how can you expect business leaders to plan and execute on marketing methods that are not predictable? By having a data driven marketing system in place you can position your marketing program to deliver data that can forecast predicable measures such as content and leads.
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