Our civilization has drastically evolved throughout recorded existence, from the Neolithic period to the contemporary digital realm. The marketing sector is no exception. For ages, marketing has undergone remarkable development. We didn’t really see the impact straight away.
It began as a unique field that went through many stages of development. With economic factors at the forefront, businesses were forced to compete for customers’ focus while keeping their ROI locked in.
This being said, there are several subcategories under marketing, ranging from traditional to societal and digital marketing. Inbound marketing falls under digital marketing, and it is now believed to be the holy grail of business growth thanks to its unique, non-intrusive approach to connecting brands to customers, whether they are other businesses (B2B) or consumers (B2C).
Thinking of investing in inbound marketing? Read on!
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a style of marketing that focuses on creating content to attract customers to a brand in a holistic and natural way. Inbound marketing is a strategic approach whose ultimate goal is forming valuable and long-lasting relationships with clients. This is done by providing “solutions” or answers to people’s concerns and questions to make the “solution provider” an authority figure and a thought leader.
These solutions can take the shape of a variety of features across all of your channels, each geared to interact with potential customers at various phases of the buyer’s journey and marketing / sales funnel. Inbound marketing succeeds because it is fully focused on what buyers need and are seeking right now.
It isn’t about pushing your name onto people’s daily lives; it’s about being around and ready whenever they’re shopping for what you have to offer. Inbound marketing is effective when you provide high-quality material that your target audience is interested in.
Inbound vs Outbound Marketing
Determining where to spend your time, attention, and, maybe most crucially, money, when it pertains to marketing initiatives is a vital, though complex, step for a business. Every company requires a marketing plan, but must you use inbound marketing, outbound marketing, or both? The ideal answer is inbound marketing with hints of outbound marketing.
Source: Software Advice
Demand Metric provided numerous fascinating statistics regarding inbound marketing, but the highlight is that it costs 62% less per lead. When it comes to ROI and finances, that’s a huge difference.
According to a HubSpot survey, the average pricing for outbound-focused organizations is $364 per lead, which is substantially more than the price of inbound marketing, which is $135 per lead.
Investing in Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing agencies have become more popular today than before, and rightfully so. For one, inbound marketing is a “softer” way of marketing that has proven to garner more long-lasting results in terms of client retention thanks to its friendly nature.
This being said, hiring an inbound marketing agency and investing in inbound marketing have become companies’ go-to means of growing their brand. So, why invest in inbound marketing?
Investing in inbound marketing will save you more money
Several studies have demonstrated that inbound marketing is 62% less costly than outbound marketing. Furthermore, after around five months of successfully executing an inbound approach, the median price per lead lowers by 80%.
This is due to the fact that several aspects of an inbound marketing strategy, such as SEO, social media, and content development (blogs, eBooks, videos, infographics, etc.) have a relatively low cost when compared with the generated ROI post-initiatives. You might need to invest in email automation tools and other inbound systems, but the yearly expenditures can be far lower than traditional promotional methods.
There’s a rationale behind why we don’t spend a lot of money on paid ads: blogs such as this one do a great job of driving web traffic, raising brand awareness, and even generate leads. Traditional outbound tactics are not required with a good inbound approach, but they can effectively complement it, and for inexpensive costs.
It can thus be confidently said that investing in inbound marketing would save you money, especially in the long run, despite still having to pay – capitalism. Nothing is free.
Investing in inbound marketing will skyrocket awareness of your brand
Your company exists and you have a lot to offer, but your name isn’t as widely known as you would like or as would most benefit your ROI. Consequently, you are looking for ways to enhance your digital footprint to be able to reach a wider audience in hopes of growing your customer base and increasing your sales.
Inbound marketing is your best friend – when a solid inbound marketing strategy is put into motion, your brand awareness will undoubtedly witness a huge boost.
This is because inbound marketing focuses on content creation and content marketing, social media content curation and promotions, and SEO. Inbound marketing agencies are responsible for regularly establishing novel content in order to boost your SEO and raise your chances of getting found online.
The more search engine-optimized material you share, the more probable it is that your ideal customers will find said content (and you) during the decision-making process. Blogging is the most convenient approach to generate consistent content.
This leads to the conclusion that investing in inbound marketing is the pioneer of brand awareness and organically capturing leads.
Investing in inbound marketing will help you garner more qualified leads
Inbound lead generation is a strategy for bringing new clients to your business. It develops when a business distributes targeted content to its ideal, segmented audience. This information is intended to compel the consumer to take action, therefore initiating a two-way connection that will inevitably result in increased sales.
There’s a difference between a regular lead and a qualified one. When you market your products or services to a wide, unsegmented audience, you are bound to garnering people’s interest. However, not all of those who are interested in your brand can be dubbed as prospective customers for various reasons. One of these reasons is that they might not be searching for what you have to offer.
Qualified leads, on the other hand, are people who not only show interest in your offerings but also are looking for a solution that you offer. This type of lead can be won via unsegmented, untargeted content, but the odds of them finding you grows exponentially when you target them specifically – them and their pain points, that is.
Since inbound marketing is all about segmenting and targeting the ideal customers, your efforts will show at least double the results when targeting groups of people. This is done, again, through specific content creation and curation based on SEO and SEM, which have proven to have a substantial impact on the content’s reach and success.
Therefore, investing in inbound marketing will not only save you money and help you increase awareness of your brand, but also help you attract qualified leads which will lead to a boost in ROI.
Investing in inbound marketing will help you generate a higher ROI
The difficulty of demonstrating marketing ROI is not novel. Marketers have long attempted to define and measure it, with various levels of effectiveness. Marketing ROI is straightforward in theory: the aim is to generate more than a dollar for every one spent on marketing.
Brand awareness is difficult to assess, and conventional marketing approaches miss the closed-loop reporting required to really evaluate marketing ROI. Inbound marketing is much easier to manage and quantify than traditional marketing strategies, making it easier to demonstrate ROI.
How exactly does this happen?
- Organizations that nurture leads generate 50% more revenue at a 33% lesser cost than leads that are not nurtured (Weidert Group blog)
- After 5 months of routine inbound marketing, the overall price per lead lowers by 80% (Impact Plus blog)
- On average, inbound leads cost 62% less than outbound leads (Impact Plus blog)
- Inbound persona-driven data raises the amount of sales qualified leads by 45% (Weidert Group blog)
- Content marketing generates three times the number of leads as sponsored search engine marketing (Weidert Group blog)
This being said and keeping in mind that investing in inbound marketing generates highly-qualified leads, it is fair to say that your sales will increase with inbound strategies, inevitably resulting in higher long-term returns on investment.
Investing in inbound marketing improves your search engine ranking
Though true that any form of marketing is bound to improve your search engine ranking, investing in inbound marketing and consistently working on the inbound strategy has proven to boost and maintain your position on search engines.
When you successfully reach your target audience, you will be seen as a solution-provider. This is reflected in search engine rankings – search engines will push you to the top since you are the answer to people’s questions.
Take Verve Videos, for example. The animated explainer video company is one of the clients we worked for. Before they adopted an inbound marketing strategy, they were on the 6th page of Google. However, after a few months following an all-encompassing inbound strategy, they now rank on the first page of Google for the keyword “animated explainer video company.”
This is attributable to the fact that inbound marketing boasts SEO strategies. When done right and combined with content marketing – leveraging meta-descriptions, keywords in the content, backlinks, and appropriate permalinks for each page – SEO can take a low-profile brand and make it a high-profile one.
Since you will be gaining organic traffic and engagement, your ranking will last for longer than if you were first on Google Ads. Thus, investing in inbound marketing also allows you to be more visible for a more extended period of time.
Why Should a B2B Business Invest in Inbound Marketing?
The goal of an inbound marketing approach is to target the correct prospects while continually producing high-quality content that they will consider essential. Creating content for the different phases of the buyer’s journey that recognizes a prospective customer’s interests and concerns and assists them in finding answers helps develop rapport.
Customers are guided through the different phases of the inbound marketing funnel as they conduct their investigation, and it’s your responsibility as an aspiring thought leader to be there for them.
The Attract stage of the marketing funnel
The Attract stage of the marketing funnel is where your business strives to garner more awareness of its presence and potential solutions to the target audience’s pain points.
At this point, you know that you exist and your past clients know that you exist, but many people who could benefit from your offerings still don’t. It is your job to attract them to you, which the inbound methodology is here for. The most critical criterion for attracting quality audiences to your business is understanding who your target audience is and what attracts them.
Furthermore, your company must examine potential clients’ difficulties and demands, as well as the predicaments that they confront. Consumers are in the middle of researching and exploring at this point in their journey, which will eventually inspire them to make a purchasing decision.
Content creation, particularly video content, is among the most powerful and pragmatic marketing tactics that your company can employ to attract and engage buyers, especially on social media. All of these criteria, when combined, will allow you to create an inbound marketing strategy that appeals to inbound leads. This is how investing in inbound marketing helps you attract more clients.
The Engage stage of the marketing funnel
The Engage stage of the marketing funnel is where buyers have gotten acquainted with your brand and are moving down the funnel. When they interact or engage with you, they are at the consideration phase of the buyer’s journey. This means that they have found the solution to their problem and have begun looking at said solution’s providers, i.e. you and your competitors.
At this stage of the Inbound Marketing funnel, you must proactively encourage customers to connect with you, which is most commonly accomplished using Call-to-Action buttons — your company must build relationships. Contacts are people whom your company markets to, sells to, partners with, engages with, or hires.
Your company is establishing contact with these people. At this stage, having a large contact database is essential. Storing information on who your prospects are, what they seek from your company, and segmenting them with appropriate offerings is the way to go.
The Close stage of the marketing funnel
The Close stage of the marketing funnel is where the purchase is made. It is possibly the most important stage in the inbound marketing funnel. In terms of the inbound strategy, your company should push the boundaries and up the ante.
Consumers are essentially turned into leads at this stage in the buyer’s journey. They are also qualified and have indicated legitimate willingness in working for your organization. This is the stage at which the sales process begins, quality inbound leads are transformed into paying clients, and the transaction is closed.
Ultimately, the decision-making step takes place during the close stage. At this stage in the journey, the buyer will choose a certain brand because they have a framework in place to handle their pain point.
The Delight stage of the marketing funnel
Your company was effective in raising awareness, attracting leads, and nurturing them through the funnel. However, the inbound marketing methodology does not end here. The Delight stage of the inbound marketing funnel is one of the most ignored, which is a tribulation in and of itself.
Just because you were able to close a deal doesn’t mean that you can “forget” about your clients. Delighting your clients would entice them to become recurring customers, thus strengthening the bond between the two of you. This is why investing in inbound marketing does wonders for customer retention.
B2B sales
B2B sales require trustworthiness. Admittedly, would you purchase things from a provider you’ve never heard of? Obviously not. Sales do not occur in the absence of trust. How do you foster trust? Deliver solutions while demonstrating experience and confidence.
How do you instill trust in buyers? You accomplish this by supplying them with facts that prove your ability to address their difficulties. This provides consumers with the assurance to proceed in their buyer’s journey. Today’s consumers find the procedure to be quite complicated. It has the potential to cause confusion and delays. Closing rates rise when consumers receive information that inspires faith and confidence. Thus, investing in B2B inbound marketing is the holy grail of increasing sales.
Conclusion
Investing in inbound marketing is worth every penny you spend on it because of the proven effectiveness it entails and the multiple advantages it provides. When all else fails, you’ve got a friend in inbound marketing. After all, its customer-centric approach makes it feel warm, and you are our customer.
We are bound to make you feel appreciated while striving to make your target audience feel that way towards you. Don’t hesitate to contact us for a free consultation to discuss your goals and to set up an inbound marketing plan just for you! We expect you to start seeing increased engagement and higher ROI within the first 5 months, which is quite impressive! We would love to hear from you.
