Entrepreneurs and business leaders have realised that inbound marketing is the most effective way to attract potential customers. It is more relied upon than traditional advertising methods. In the current scenario, business leaders need to understand the fundamentals of the best inbound marketing practices to build brand recognition and increase customer loyalty. HubSpot’s seventh annual State of Inbound report reveals the practice and adoption of inbound marketing methods by various business houses. The data clearly reveals how implementation of the best practices have put the leaders ahead and the laggers far behind. It is a comprehensive global document, covering data from more than 150 countries.
The success the companies surveyed reveals that:
- Inbound marketing efforts help in achieving higher ROI than outbound efforts regardless of company size or the investments made in marketing
- Top marketers are not enticed to go for paid campaigns and have realized that outbound marketing is overrated
- Inbound marketing enabled top marketers to track ROI, follow its growth and secure increased budget as a result of this
- Successes with inbound marketing in the previous year is one big factor that enables?? budget increase
- Since content marketing is one of the best forms of inbound marketing, both staff and guest contributors in a company write marketing content
- Top marketers check their marketing analytics more than three times per week
According to the report, companies that spend less than $5M annually on marketing prefer inbound marketing methods. In fact, most companies saw a higher ROI on inbound marketing campaigns than on outbound. The data revealed by State Inbound shows that 57% of respondents from organisations that saw greater ROI in 2015 than the previous year cited that paid advertising is an overrated marketing tactic. The leading marketers track the ROIs to prove success and reap better results in the future. The research also focused on the increase and decrease of inbound budget. In 2014, no single factor was significant in building a higher inbound budget than previous successful inbound marketing campaigns. However, here it is important to mention that past failure with inbound marketing also resulted in a higher budget. This means that inbound is a long and complicated game. If you start slow, you should not back off but try to double down.
Content marketing has been one of the most successful business strategies. Business organisations that saw an increase in ROI from 2014 to 2015 were most likely to augment their content creation efforts by employing both staff writers and guest contributors.
Research reveals that organisations that achieved greater ROI in 2015 than 2014 were approximately 20% more likely to check their marketing analytics three or more times each week.
Inbound marketing is a slow but long game. To get into the game, here are a few inbound marketing practices that you should implement today.
- Content marketing: Content is an essential component of inbound marketing. Marketers need to create content that they can leverage during follow-up to build credibility and employ prospects. The ROI on quality content is so high that marketers can’t ignore it.
- Social Media Marketing: Rely on social media marketing to disseminate the content. LinkedIn and Twitter are two important social networking sites for B2B marketers. Social networking is mainly used to target the right audience in the right places.
- Creating responsive websites: Nowadays people access sites through tablets and smartphones. So, marketers must ensure that the site and the content is responsive to allow easy access on all devices.
- SEO tactics: It is important to implement the best SEO tactics to ensure higher ranking of the website in the search engine result page.
Marketers have realised that implementing these inbound marketing strategies guarantees a surge in web traffic and enhances online visibility.