Incoming!!

Inbound marketing campaigns are 3x more likely to produce higher ROI than outbound.

Inbound marketing is how you promote your company via content marketing to attract prospects into your sales funnel. You do this by positioning content on blogs, podcasts, video, e-newsletters, whitepapers, SEO, social media and more.

Need an example? You’re looking at one. The BROADcast is a form of inbound marketing that we’ve been producing since 2001, with content repurposed on our blog and social media assets. (Check out our very first article dated January 1, 2001.) The term “inbound marketing” wasn’t even coined until 2005!

With inbound activities, you showcase unique value propositions and competitive differentiators with relevant content that’s presented in an easily consumed format. Savvy marketers have learned that going out to get a prospect’s attention with cold calling or radio campaigns is much less effective than drawing them in to a strategic, and fully trackable, website, social media asset or landing page.

This is especially true for small businesses with knowledge-based products and longer research cycles. Inbound marketing is all about ensuring that prospects researching your products and services find mention of you in plenty of places on the Internet — not just your own website.

Hubspot is a software company that specializes in inbound marketing and is widely considered the authority on the subject. We recently curled up with the company’s impressive 73-page State of Inbound 2015 and offer the following highlights about lead strategies and automated marketing tools.

Lead Strategies

Top marketing priorities reported by Hubspot included increasing the number contacts and leads, and converting those contacts into customers.

Sound familiar? It does to us. The solution we deploy at BroadBased for ourselves and for our clients is a robust content marketing strategy that creates rich, dynamic information valued by customers, prospects and Google. The consistent and informative messages nurture your audience, guide them through your sales funnel, and strengthen your relationship.

Smarter Tools

Hubspot: “Unsuccessful sales teams are 2x more likely to use Excel, Outlook, or physical files to store lead and customer data.”

Companies are so worried about increasing leads and conversions that their efforts have become a considerable investment cost. Not to mention, the “brute force” business development tactics rely on antiquated technology that makes leads difficult to track and offers little insight in the way of hard data.

Modern marketers have found that the success of an inbound campaign can hinge on the technology and tools that are employed, and they’re investing in automated marketing solutions as their primary tools.

One of the biggest challenges they face is choosing the right automation platform for a particular customer or campaign. There’s a dizzying array of products and platforms on the market, with a ride range of features and costs. At BroadBased, we’ve worked with several of these tools and can guide you in selecting one that best fits your specific needs. Or if you have an automation tool that you would like help setting up and testing, we can lend a hand there, too.

Trends come and go and not every new strategy is a fit for every business, but we’re confident that inbound is the future of online marketing. Consider this: Of the nearly 4,000 people surveyed across all company types (B2B, B2C and nonprofit) inbound had a 75 percent likelihood of being the marketing approach of choice, and we at BroadBased agree with them.

3,001 marketers can’t all be wrong!