Blog Post

Why 2015 Should Be the Final Year You DON'T Do Inbound Marketing

  • By Mark Baker
  • 14 Oct, 2015

By this point, I am quite sure you’ve heard about or been impacted by inbound marketing—the methodology of attracting visitors through content, converting those visitors into customers, and ultimately turning those customers into promoters of your brand. If you haven't pulled the trigger yet to adopt this technique in your business, the results are in—it's time to start.

HubSpot has just released its 7th annual State of Inbound Report, a compilation and analysis of survey results from nearly 4,000 marketers in more than 150 countries who work for B2B SMBs. It's an excellent snapshot of what problems and successes sales and marketing teams are experiencing around the world at this very moment.

This year's report confirms that inbound marketing is an effective solution for all types of companies. These companies are leveraging the methodology to get the measurable results required to build brand awareness, acquire more leads, close more deals, and ultimately delight their customers.  

Here are some highlights from this year's report:

  • Inbound has taken the top spot in the marketing mix for the majority of companies3 out of 4 marketers across the globe prioritize an inbound approach to marketing.
  • Want more budget? Prove the ROI. Proven marketing ROI unlocks budget. But you have to track ROI in the first place, which not everyone is doing.
  • Inbound marketing is like an annuity. It continues to pay off over time.Leading marketers recognize that inbound is a long game. Both past success and past failures coorelate with an inbound marketing budget increase.
  • Inbound is the preferred marketing strategy regardless of company type: B2B, B2C, nonprofit. Everyone is implementing inbound tactics.
  • Inbound outperforms outbound. Inbound campaigns achieve higher ROI than outbound. This holds true across varrying company sizes and budgets.
  • Establishing a Marketing-Sales service level agreement (SLA) leads to higher ROI. The presence of an SLA also correlates with budget and staff increases.
  • Different roles within the sales team experience different CRM obstacles.While manual data entry is still the biggest CRM problem overall, executives struggle with lack of adoption of standardized methods, and managers attribute their problems to lack of integration with other tools.
  • Researching your leads prior to initial contact increases the chances of landing the next deal. Prospecting is the most difficult step of the sales process. This issue is compounded by salespeople's lack of vital information before they reach out to leads.

Inbound marketing is clearly measureable and a highly effective strategy for marketers and sales teams all over the world. The data within the report goes much deeper than this. But, I believe these points alone provide a good argument for why 2015 has to be the last year you DON'T do inbound marketing.

Check out the report for yourself. I would love to hear your takeaways.  

Mark Baker

Mark Baker is a natural artist. Since starting his first business hand painting graphics onto vehicles in high school, Mark gained experience in the entertainment, sports, and retail industries before founding this company in 1993. Honest and pragmatic, Mark knows that anything can be accomplished with a great communication plan and creative thinking. 

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