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The world of Inbound Marketing is ever-evolving at a rapid pace, and if you want to succeed consistently as a marketer, you need to keep on top of the latest emerging patterns and practices for attracting, engaging and converting prospects.
To provide insight into the lay of the land, HubSpot annually survey thousands of the world’s marketers and salespeople to produce the State of Inbound report.
The 2015 report, released in October, covers the growth of inbound marketing, emerging trends, best practice and strategy. Here are some key takeaways you need to know about...
Optimisation over spend
Companies who are satisfied that their marketing budget is appropriate now want to focus on driving more leads and conversions, rather than focusing on reducing overall spend.
From the viewpoint of the business, ultimately they desire an increase in ROI, but from the viewpoint of the marketer, this means the businesses are happy to continue to invest in their departments/agencies/freelancers at the same level. Additionally, this suggests that the people allocating the inbound budget understand that it is about development over time rather than an aggressive, direct-response approach.
ROI still the top priority, but the rest of the field is mixing it up
When it comes to marketer’s concerns and main challenges, proving ROI remains the number one concern, and understandably so. ROI is the ultimate performance metric to report to the people at the top, and can prove difficult if closed loop reporting isn’t in place, or lifetime value/sales conversion rates aren’t known.
While this is the case up top, the following priorities have seen a year-on-year change: There is a marked upturn in the importance of finding an executive sponsor, which goes hand in hand with the joint second place priority of securing enough budget. The other significant upturn, which spells out a huge opportunity for juniors in the field, is the increase in importance placed on training the team, which has doubled from 2014.
Inbound works for your organisation type
Whether B2B, B2C or non-profit, preference for inbound marketing outweighs outbound at a rate of 3:1 across those surveyed. For the inbound industry, this is further evidence that businesses are progressively understanding and seeing the value in inbound marketing.
Key factors that may drive this are; the understanding of targeting techniques across PPC/social channels, and the easy, quick availability of a large amount of intelligence on acquisition sources, audience and activity paths.
Content has taken on a life of its own
Content writing has previously been just a part of the marketing landscape, with its production viewed as part of the in-house marketer’s day-to-day role.
Nowadays, the amount of marketing content produced out-of-house, by agencies and freelancers alike has increased significantly. This upturn indicates that an ever-increasing number of people and businesses understand that there is an acute technique to content marketing, and it needs producing carefully and methodically to produce the best results possible.
The wrap-up
All in all, the report shows that inbound marketing and the related methodology is becoming increasingly more valued and accepted in business as the key way to reach your audience with the message that provides the most value to them.
To find out more about the information shared in this blog, you can download the State of Inbound 2015 report below: