Love Inbound Marketing

The cost of living in this country is expensive, the cost of running a business – even more so. This isn’t news, everyone knows this already, but what you might not know is that inbound marketing continues to outperform traditional marketing, its also cheaper and increases profits too.

Traditional marketing practises include activities such as print media, billboards, newspaper adverts, flyers, TV advertising as well as cold calling. We can all agree that these are certainly very expensive forms of getting brand exposure and/or customers and with little or no reporting attached to their effectiveness.Traditional marketing is a lot like throwing things against the wall and hoping they stick. It is tough to track real quantitative results.

Traditional marketing also usually requires outside help, by this we mean items such as printing materials, buying media space and creating radio/ TV advertisements all require hiring outside help, which adds to costs. Also and most importantly is that traditional marketing is almost always forced on the consumer, they don’t necessarily ask for it.

Make no mistake, we are not implying that this form of marketing is dead nor do we think it ever will be but, we are certainly implying is that Inbound Marketing outperforms this area of marketing in every single way.

Here are 8 statistics supplied by HubSpot to prove just how much cheaper, profitable and more effective inbound marketing is over its rival forms of marketing.

1. 61% of global Internet users research products online.
2. 44% of online shoppers begin by using a search engine.
3. Businesses with websites of 401-1000 pages get 6x more leads than those with 51-100 pages.
4. 86% of consumers stated that using a search engine allowed them to learn something new or important that helped him/her increase his/her knowledge.
5. 60% of all organic clicks go to the organic top 3 search results
6. YouTube has become the 2nd Largest Search Engine – bigger than Bing, Yahoo, Ask & AOL combined.
7. 50% of all mobile searches are conducted in hopes of finding local results and 61% of those searches result in a purchase.
8. SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads (such as direct mail or print advertising) have a 1.7% close rate.

According to Search Engine Journal, inbound leads cost 60% less than outbound leads. Considering the amount of waste associated with traditional marketing, inbound marketing provides a much more focused program that matches today’s buyer behaviour.

Statistics don’t lie; people (your customers) don’t want to be sold to, the want the ability to make informed decisions for themselves based on relevant, interesting content. Implement these practises into your business and you won’t need to call them (your customer) – They WILL call you.