If you’re looking to grow your small business, inbound marketing is your best bet.
With 60% of marketers suggesting their highest quality leads come from inbound marketing practices, it’s worth looking at.
Especially because inbound leads tend to cost so much less to earn.
Today, we’re going to look at the stats that prove inbound marketing is worth your time and effort.
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Being Late To The Party Can Hurt Your Efforts
Inbound marketing is constantly changing.
If you fail to keep up with those changes, it’s going to hurt your efforts.
That means you’ve got to regularly educate yourself with what’s working and what’s not.
You also need to backtrack over what you’re already doing and make sure you have a foundation in place.
The longer you wait to do that, the more it’s going to hurt your efforts.
Know What Inbound Can Do For Your Business
Before you look at putting a complete inbound strategy in place, you ought to know what you get from it.
The fact is that inbound is a lot of time and effort, and sometimes money, that can be off putting if you don’t know why you’re doing it.
The fact is that inbound is a lot of time and effort, and sometimes money, that can be off putting if you don’t know why you’re doing it. Click To TweetThese statistics outline exactly what you and your company could get from a great inbound strategy.
Content Marketing
Your inbound marketing strategy’s biggest player is your content.
If you can keep up on the media types, formats, and methods that are working best, you can win big in this arena.
Blog Content
Blogging is at the foundation of content marketing.
Simple enough that anyone can do it, it remains a staple for one good reason: it works.
- The average blog post takes about 3.5 hours to write. (2017 Orbit Media Survey)
- 10% of blog posts compound, or get better with time, and make up 38% of traffic. (Compounding Blog Posts Report)
Blogging is worth the time, but only if you’re consistent.
- Publishing 4 or more times a week earns companies 4.5 times the leads. (HubSpot Data)
- Nearly half of buyers read 3-5 blogs before contacting a sales rep. (2016 Demand Gen Report Survey)
Don’t blog just to blog, though. Give your audience substance.
- Companies generate 9 times the leads with long-form posts. (Curata Research)
- Google’s first page results average almost 2,000 words. (2016 Backlinko Research)
You might want to make sure a great blog is a part of your strategy.
Video Content
I’m an advocate of video content as an efficient way to deliver your message.
Videos are huge.
- 400% more people would rather watch video about a product. (2015 Animoto Online & Social Video Marketing Study)
- The top media format most consumers want to see from brands they support is video. (2018 HubSpot Content Trends Survey)
In fact, not having videos can cost you leads.
- When shoppers view a video, it makes them 181% more likely to purchase than shoppers who didn’t. (2015 Animoto Online & Social Video Marketing Study)
- 25% of consumers lose interest in a company without a video. (2015 Animoto Online & Social Video Marketing Study)
The losses are real. Don’t wait to make video work for you.
Your competition is probably already ahead of you.
- Nearly 60% of B2B marketers are using video via YouTube. (2018 CMI & MarketingProfs’ B2B Content Marketing Trends Report)
- Almost 90% of markers are going to increase their video content in the next year. (2018 State of Social Report)
You can’t afford to keep missing out on this medium.
Podcasting
Podcasts are the ultimate form of convenient content.
Your audience can keep listening to your podcast while they do other things.
This is a space with lots of real estate available.
- Only 11% of marketers have plans to start a podcast in the next year. (2018 State of Inbound)
- Only 28% are trying to learn about podcasting. (2018 Social Media Marketing Industry Report)
Yet, the audience is there.
- About 73 million Americans admitted listening to a podcast in the past 30 days. (Edison Research’s 2018 Infinite Dial study)
- About 112 million people have listened to at least one podcast. (2017 Edison Research Podcast Consumer survey)
Obviously, you need to get your podcast going while the opportunity is still this big.
Website Design & Development
In case you weren’t aware, you need a website to gather leads from an inbound strategy.
As the center of your content, it’s going to play a huge role in that process.
Your user experience – the way your layout, format, and design impact your visitors’ overall visit – are a big factor in how well you engage with your audience.
In case you weren’t aware, you need a website to gather leads from an inbound strategy. Click To TweetYour site needs to be mobile ready.
- Nearly half of consumers worldwide spend most of their internet time on mobile devices. (2018 HubSpot Global Preference Study)
- Two-thirds of the time spent online is done from a mobile device. (2017 Statista data)
- Adults in the US are spending over 3 hours per day on mobile media. (2017 eMarketer Research)
Plus, people are getting more impatient.
That’s why live chat is becoming a must-have feature on your site.
- If you wait 5 minutes to respond to a website visitor, you’re 10 times less likely to make contact at all. (2017 Drift Lead Response Survey)
- Chat earns a higher satisfaction score (819/1000) than email, telephone, and website support. (2016 JD Power Chat And Email Benchmarking Study)
- Over half of consumers will give up a purchase without a quick answer to their questions. (2016 Forrester Future of Customer Service Report)
With that level of importance, you’d better get live chat added to your site ASAP.
Search Engine Optimization
Even though it’s changing, SEO is still a huge part of an inbound strategy, and it won’t be going away any time soon.
You’ve got to make sure you’re staying on top of the latest SEO changes.
Google is still the gateway to your company.
- Google is processing over a trillion searches per year. (Internet Live Stats Data)
- Over half of all website traffic comes from organic search. (2017 BrightEdge Channel Performance Report)
- 76% of people who do a local search on their device visit a store within 1 business day. (Think With Google)
Learning to do SEO can be tough, but it’s worth it.
Google is still the gateway to your company. Click To TweetAsk your competition.
- 45% of marketing influencers feel like they’re exceeding goals using SEO. (2017 Ascend2 SEO Survey)
- Most marketers say improving SEO is their #1 inbound marketing priority. (2018 State of Inbound)
- The average company’s SEO spending is over $5,000 every month. (Moz/SparkToro Survey)
To get it done right, you need great content and backlinks.
- Over half of marketers say making their on-page content better is the most effective part of SEO. (2017 Ascend2 SEO Survey)
- Google still ranks backlinks among the top 3 ranking factors. (Google’s Andrey Lipattsev Interview)
How’s your SEO? Maybe you want to investigate it.
Social Channels
Social media is critical to engagement.
People of all ages and demographics are using social media daily.
When you understand how, you can do a much better job of connecting with them.
Social media is a game changer for most businesses.
- 87% of marketers say they’ve increased exposure through social media. (2018 Social Media Examiner Industry Report)
- 29% of people turn to social media to research a product or service. (Global Web Index Data)
- Over three-quarters of US consumers purchase products they see in their social feed. (2017 Curalate Consumer Survey)
It’s important to understand who you’re talking to.
- Facebook users are mostly female and live in urban areas. (2018 PEW Research)
- 40% of LinkedIn users use it daily. (Omnicore Agency Data)
- 30% of Twitter’s US users make $75,000 or more annually. (2018 PEW Research)
- Millennials ages 18-24 are mostly on Snapchat, making up 78% of its users. (2018 PEW Research)
- 300 million accounts post Instagram stories every day. (Instagram Business Data)
Select the social networks that might be right for you and get your micro content game in play.
Email Marketing
Email is my favorite part of inbound marketing.
It’s the element that never seems to stop working.
For the most part, that’s because people like emails (regardless of what they may say). Click To TweetIf you know what you’re doing, you can really make an impact here.
- Three quarters of marketers claim their most effective content format is email. (2018 CMI & MarketingProfs’ B2B Content Marketing Trends Report)
- In 2017, the ROI for every dollar invested in email was $32.28. (2017 DMA Email Tracking Report)
- Sending 3 emails to someone who abandons their cart gets 69% more orders than sending only 1. (2018 Omnisend Data Analysis)
For the most part, that’s because people like emails (regardless of what they may say).
- About half of consumers want a weekly email from their favorite brands. (2017 Statista Data)
- Half of consumers prefer all their marketing communications to be email. (2018 Adobe Consumer Email Survey)
With that in mind, you’re going to want to get your emails rocking.
Inbound Marketing Works Better When It’s Properly Informed
That’s a lot of info we just went over.
But you should understand the benefits of inbound marketing because of it.
Now, as you plan out your inbound marketing strategy, you can keep this in mind.
That’s going to help you produce an overall strategy that will perform at a high level.
With work, patience, and time, your inbound marketing strategy will begin to produce more leads at a higher quality.
Plus, it’s going to outperform your outbound strategies by a lot.
Now go put your new knowledge to work.
