INBOUND ACCELERATOR

I’ve talked recently about using conversion rates to pinpoint your most effective inbound marketing elements — which offers, landing pages and blog posts most consistently generate new online leads — so let’s continue geeking out about metrics and numbers for just a bit. While I love the creative process of developing marketing strategies and campaign materials, I also love seeing the results in cold, hard data.

How do you recognize a great partner? One thing to look for is a company that continuously looks for ways to improve not just its own bottom line (all companies want to do that) but to improve the products, services and experiences it provides so that its own customers and partners are more successful.

While marketing involves a certain level of art, in the creativity needed to develop messaging and craft visual elements, it is in many ways a numbers game.

Those numbers should begin with the goals you set for your marketing, determined by working backward from the needed customers and revenue, through the leads needed to close those sales, to the contacts and web traffic required to generate the necessary number of leads.

If you’ve been reading the Inbound Accelerator the last few weeks, you’ve heard about how important it is to monitor your business blog’s performance in order to stack up actual results against goals, make decisions to improve future performance, and prove the ROI of your inbound marketing efforts.

What makes marketing automation so beneficial?

The list of benefits is long, but the features of automation that are most essential for inbound marketers are those that improve performance of marketing campaigns, increase conversion of leads into sales, provide objective measurement of marketing efforts to prove ROI and attribute sales accurately.

Trust is important in B2B relationships. For me, trusting a vendor is centered not only around the performance of the product or service, but also around the responsiveness of the people within the company that I work with.

One of the challenges many marketers face today is finding the resources needed to implement their marketing strategy — not only in terms of budget resources, but the human resources of experience, skill and time.

At the core of inbound marketing, which HubSpot has perfected over the years, is the concept of the customer coming to you. “Inbound” means that prospects are seeking you out vs. outbound methods that chase down prospects with “interruption marketing” that doesn’t necessarily reach them at the right time or place.

When I think about the statistics highlighted in this infographic, which come from HubSpot’s 2017 definitive annual report on the marketing industry, State of Inbound, I feel both reassurance and unease.

With the internet as a primary information source nearing 25 years in existence (Google turns 20 in September 2018), it seems unnecessary to give marketing strategies labels specific to that platform. After all, EVERYONE is online in some form, right?

Yet, we still do specify a few distinct areas of marketing, and for good reason. Not all online marketing is created equal.