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Inbound Marketing is not a Channel or a Technology, it’s a Strategy
I’ve been telling partners and marketers at CPA, consulting and other professional services firms that the tidal wave of inbound marketing is here and that it’s a pretty good idea to be on your surfboard and riding into shore.
Today’s marketing is all about earning someone’s interest, and to do so, you need to create marketing people love. Inbound marketing is all about the tools, processes, resources and mindset a firm needs to earn someone’s interest, and to then turn that interest into new business.
(If you want to know more about what inbound marketing is all about then click here for our Partner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing.)
2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report
HubSpot recently released its fifth annual 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report. The report has a ton of very cool insights about the tidal wave, including one that made me go “hmmmmmmm…..”
“The research shows that nearly 60% of marketers have adopted inbound marketing strategies and more than 80% of those executing inbound marketing have integrated it into broader company goals.
“What??!!”, you may be saying to yourself, “Are we really doing inbound marketing?”
If you’ve optimized your website to get found first, then you’re doing a piece of inbound marketing. If you’re blogging, you’re inbound marketing? Using your website for lead generation with conversion forms? Yep, you’re inbound marketing!
Whether you’re doing inbound marketing in an integrated and planed method is a whole other story. Even though your firm may be laying pieces of the inbound marketing approach into place, whether or not you’ve integrated them into all parts of your marketing program is probably – and hopefully – a work in progress.
I pulled a couple of charts from the Report which can be of use if you’re trying to educate partners on inbound marketing and what firms across all different types of industries are doing. Here’s a few interesting benchmarks that got my attention:
- 23% of marketers say their top priority is reaching the right audience, tied with converting leads into customers.
- 20% of marketers are looking to increase total lead volume as a priority
- 18% cite creating quality content as an inbound marketing priority
- Only 13% say improving RO is a priority, which is interesting given that the study found that tracking concrete ROI is a major challenge for 25% of all marketers
Finally, let me share one of the conclusions of the Report:
“Inbound marketing is not a channel or a technology, it’s a strategy: It’s not enough to “do” inbound. To see real results, you need to deeply commit to the model and optimize continually. Marketers that succeed with inbound marketing dedicate a high level of time, commitment, and resources to getting it right.”
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