In my last post, I talked about the growing popularity of inbound marketing. Statistics indicate that marketers are increasing the proportion of their budgets devoted to inbound marketing, integrating inbound strategies with their traditional efforts and reporting positive return on their investments. While the trends are instructive, it’s results that matter.
Fortunately, the return on your inbound marketing efforts is relatively easy to measure. While you might never have known how many prospects came your way based on a billboard, a radio advertisement or even a telephone directory listing, digital marketing is different. Tracking links, web analytics and customer management systems make it possible to follow a prospect’s path from his first visit to your website right up to the point of conversion.
Earlier this year, HubSpot pulled together that type of data from more than 7,000 businesses across multiple industries and revealed the following:
- Companies with 51 to 100 website pages generate 48% more traffic than companies with 1-50 pages.
- Companies with 101 to 200 pages generate 2.5 times as many leads as companies with 50 pages or fewer.
- B2B businesses that blog even once or twice a month see 70% more leads than those without blogs.
- Businesses that blog 15 times per month draw five times as much traffic as companies without blogs.
The same company’s 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report shores up some of these findings and provides similar support for the use of social media marketing.
- 82% of marketers who blog reported a positive return on their inbound marketing investment, and 43% attributed at least one lead to the blog;
- 52% of marketers reported receiving at least one lead from Facebook; and
- 43% of marketers attributed at least one lead to LinkedIn.
In fact, 34% of leads generated in 2013 by the marketers surveyed came from inbound marketing efforts.
Clearly, there’s more reason to invest in inbound marketing than just “everybody’s doing it.” And, the success of inbound marketing comes as no surprise when you consider that 78% of consumers believe that organizations offering custom content are interested in building good relationships, and 61% say they’re more likely to do business with a company that delivers custom content. With near-universal Internet usage by most target markets and growing expectations on the part of both consumer and business customer bases, inbound marketing is no longer just a good idea. If you’re not making use of digital content marketing opportunities, you’re leaving the field wide open for your competitors who are evolving with the market.
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