Occasionally, we drop in on different presentations circulating online to give us insight into the state of the inbound (i.e. online) marketing industry. HubSpot’s 2010 report gives us some good insights into what’s going on.
The bottom line is this – inbound marketing techniques cost much less, around 60% in fact, than traditional media (outbound marketing) techniques. Therefore, considering the economic climate in 2009, social media and blogs in particular saw tremendous growth over the course of the year.
As you will see in the webinar, the cost per sales lead for inbound marketing channels is much lower. To illustrate, 63% of survey respondents say that the cost for generating a lead through blogs and social media came in lower than expectations…compare that to only 34% of respondents who say the same regarding telemarketing.
Results from HubSpot’s study also indicate that 51% of companies plan to spend more on inbound marketing in 2010. Much of this is due to the poor economy, as companies look to get more for their marketing dollar.
Another trend you will notice – smaller companies spend a higher proportion of their marketing budget on inbound marketing channels like blogs, social media and SEO.
The next section of the webinar focused on changes in business blogging and social media. One graph in particular illustrates the importance of good business blogging. As you will see, the more a company posts something on their blog, the higher the chance they will snag a new customer.
In the end, all inbound marketing channels have to work together in order for your efforts to be successful. You can’t simply focus on your blog without ensuring it is crawled and indexed by the search engines, for example. And you can’t simply focus on SEO without providing timely and valuable content to your readers.
Check out the webinar from HubSpot here – it takes about 30 minutes to watch the presentation but it’s well worth your time.
