How implementing inbound marketing helps you leverage your existing sales team’s skills and your overall marketing strategy to get a leg up on the competition.
There is no question that inbound marketing is the way of the future. Hubspot reports that inbound boasted 50% growth for the third year in a row in 2013. While it’s a growing trend, with more and more businesses implementing inbound strategies into their overall marketing scheme, there is still time to get ahead of the competition by taking advantage of tools and techniques they aren’t yet using. While the growth numbers are huge, only 45% of CEOs report that inbound marketing practices are fully integrated into their organizations. This means there is still time to rethink your strategy and use inbound to bound up and over your peers.
Inbound marketing gives you an advantage in many different ways, but here are five specific reasons rethinking your strategy and upgrading to inbound can help you knock down your competition and rise above and beyond.
1. An Airtight Approach
Many marketing pros express frustration at their inability to track exactly where their marketing dollars are going and how well they’re being spent. The genius of a well-executed inbound marketing plan is that it allows you to close the loop on your marketing expenditure and determine exactly which leads close into paying customers. These types of insights can be leveraged to great benefit by a smart marketing pro with a bang-up sales team. So while your competition is taking the “see what sticks” approach to marketing expenditure, your numbers will be ticking up and you’ll know exactly what’s working and why.
2. Industry Authority
Another advantage of inbound marketing is in the way it allows you to control your message and build your brand authority. A smart blogging strategy means you’re constantly generating content that catches readers’ eyes and makes you appear authoritative, even in a crowded field. If you take it to the next level and incorporate well-written eBooks and whitepapers, the results can really leave the competition in the dust. You control the message, and your audience starts to equate your brand with industry authority and expertise. Bye-bye competition!
3. Accurate Insights
While your competition is guessing about what message will play strongest to a specific demographic, you will know. Inbound allows you to track leads from the moment they begin interacting with your online presence to the moment they become paying customers. You’ll know what types of Facebook posts get you the most bang for your buck and the types of published material that garner the most downloads. On top of all that, you’ll collect customer information at every point of interaction, giving you more and more leads with potential to convert.
4. Upgraded Online Presence
If you’re struggling to convince the higher-ups that inbound is worth the investment, make the case for optimizing your company’s online presence with inbound marketing. When you upgrade to inbound, you have to invest in your entire online persona: the website, blog, social media channels, and more. This in itself will give you a leg up on your challengers, but these online upgrades also help set you up for greater success with inbound. You can rally your whole organization behind a unified inbound strategy and get everyone on the same “webpage.” If that’s not enough to convince the top tier of your organization, remind them that the conversion stats are clear: outbound’s conversion rate is 1.6%, while inbound boasts a 14.7% conversion rate. The folks in the executive suites just love those cold, hard numbers.
5. Wave of the Future
Finally, there is no doubt that our society is turning more and more toward the online realm. Businesses that don’t harness the power of productive web presence are missing the boat. If you invest in inbound, you won’t be left standing on the shore. In 2013, traditional channels of lead sourcing generated only 22% of total leads. That number is likely to keep dropping. So to stay ahead of the competition and even go above and beyond, you have to switch focus to inbound.
CONCLUSION
In order to stay ahead of your competitors, you have to be ready to adapt to changing trends in your industry. Inbound marketing is only one of the ways you can leverage valuable insights to get a leg up on everyone else. The five reasons explored above should be more than enough to convince you that if you’re missing inbound, you’re missing out!
