Marketing Turns Inbound

By: Sandhya Ramanujan

With growing evidence of increased ROI and sales, Inbound Marketing is swiftly acquiring a sweet spot in the marketing mix of businesses. According to the 2012 State of Inbound Marketing report by HubSpot, businesses that primarily use inbound marketing techniques reported 61% lower Cost Per Lead (CPL) than those relying heavily on outbound strategies. This is because inbound marketing is able to deliver high quality leads with low cost marketing channels such as SEO, Social Media and Blogs.

The advent of inbound marketing has led to the growth of data-driven results, where marketing efforts are subjected to objective measurement. 2013 will see decision makers allotting more resources to create a robust inbound engine that will generate traffic, leads, and conversions in order to fuel the demand generation engine. Inbound marketing practices are also a lot easier on the wallet when compared to conventional outbound strategies like PR. 

This avatar of marketing brings together a series of tactics that include maximizing the use of social networking, setting up a user-friendly website, a regularly updated blog etc., in order to help with lead generation. It mainly encompasses the following 4 key areas:

• Generating traffic to a website through SEO, social media marketing and blogging
• Managing online lead generation efforts by developing relevant content (such as landing pages)  in order to leverage the traffic resulting from the SMM campaigns 
• Implementing targeted lead-nurturing campaigns aimed at converting prospects into clients
• Applying metrics, analytics and measurement at every stage in the process to continually course correct and improve results

Inbound marketing is all set to change the way businesses study their target audience, comprehend their needs, and engage target audiences with relevant premium content in order to turn them into leads, and finally into customers. Use it to your advantage or get left behind!