Guest Article
If you want to stop making cold calls to promote your small business, it’s time to consider using inbound marketing as your main marketing strategy. So what is inbound marketing? Inbound marketing is advertising a company through blogs, podcasts, video, eBooks, enewsletters, whitepapers, SEO, social media marketing, and other forms of content marketing. Here are 5 compelling reasons to ditch your current marketing strategy and focus on inbound marketing.
#1: Traditional Marketing Is Being Ignored
We live in a world where the customer has all the power. With the internet at their fingertips, they can quickly research products, read reviews and price compare without ever having to talk to a sales rep or set foot in a store. That’s lead to some serious decreases in ROI for old-school marketing methods.
In 2006, it took telemarketers an average of 6 calls to make one good contact. In 2013, that number exploded to 41. It’s estimated that 44% of direct mail will never be opened and 86% of television viewers skip through ads (and with the advent of Netflix and other online content hubs, they may never see ads at all!).
Trust in traditional marketing has fallen, too. In the most recent Nielsen Global Trust in Advertising Report, less than 50% of consumers surveyed trusted radio ads, magazine ads, newspaper ads, or product placements – down 20% since 2009!
Your traditional methods will have a hard time succeeding on their own, especially when the numbers on inbound marketing are moving the other direction.
#2: Consumers Expect and Demand Content
Over 68% of consumers admitted they had spent time reading brand-created content from a company they’re interested in, while 70% said they preferred to learn about a company through articles instead of ads.
61% said reading customized content made them more likely to buy, while 58% trusted in editorial content (a huge leap over traditional marketing numbers). But perhaps one of the most important stats, 78% of consumers believe that a brand which is creating custom content is genuinely interested in building a good relationship with them.
Doesn’t that sound like the kind of switched-on consumer you’re looking to capture? If so, then you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that with inbound marketing, you can…
#3: Generate High Quality Leads
If the leads from traditional marketing are falling off, inbound marketing is doing the opposite. A study conducted by Kapost found that inbound marketing generated, on average, three times the leads per dollar of traditional methods.
FactBrowser found that B2B companies who blog generated 67% more leads per month than those who didn’t, while Hubspot’s own study found that B2C businesses with blogs generated 88% more leads per month than those who didn’t. And it pays to be social, too – companies with 51 – 100 twitter followers generate 106% more leads than those with less than 25.
On the whole, it’s estimated that inbound marketing brings in 54% more leads than outbound. That, in and of itself, should be reason to make the move.
#4: Lower Costs on Lead Generation
Who wouldn’t want to spend less for a greater return? In Hubspot’s “State of Inbound Marketing” 2013 survey, they found that the average lead through inbound costs at least 13% less to acquire than through traditional means. In another study, they found that inbound marketing across time costs up to 62% less to generate the same or better results than an outbound marketing campaign.
Forrester Research concluded that companies who excel at lead nurturing (using inbound means like content marketing and e-mail newsletters) will generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% of the cost – and the Annuitas Group found that those same nurtured leads will make 47% larger purchases than un-nurtured ones.
#5: Your Competition Already Is!
Given all of the compelling figures we’ve seen so far, it’s no surprise that 89% of businesses are either increasing or maintaining their inbound marketing budgets (Hubspot), while 92.7% of companies are using inbound marketing to increase their lead generation. According to eMarketer estimates, spending on inbound marketing practices and social media content creation will increase by 15.1 percent in 2013 to total $118.4 billion. That’s a staggering figure, especially if you’re not a part of it.
Still, you may already be doing inbound marketing without knowing it – and if so, it’s time to put some strategy and testing to work. Hubspot found that companies who test their strategies are 75% more likely to show ROI from inbound marketing in 2013 – but 34% of companies cannot or do not calculate overall inbound ROI!
The question is no longer, “Should we start using inbound marketing?” – it’s “Can we afford not to?”
About the author: Kristy Totin is the Content Marketing Manager at Teknicks, a well-known online marketing agency in New Jersey. Kristy is experienced in working across several marketing channels but has recently narrowed her initiatives to content creation and inbound marketing.
“Arrow Graph” courtesy of cooldesign / www.freedigitalphotos.net
Wow I didn’t realize how bad cold calling has become! But it makes sense. Especially when you put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Would they want to be called? or sent direct mail? Just think of your own behaviors and what grabs your attention.