Whether you’re a marketer, team leader, or senior sales person, if you’ve discovered inbound marketing and its potential for huge success, it’s quite likely your champing at the bit to start using it in your own business. However, if you’re not in a decision making position, you’ve got some convincing work ahead involving the directors or senior management team.
Don’t worry though, we’re here to help. We’ve put together 7 powerful, persuasive facts and figures to help you sell inbound marketing to your boss and highlight how successful inbound marketing can be and why your business should seriously consider making the switch.
How to win bosses and influence people
It’s common practice in larger companies to delegate responsibility for certain tasks to the departments best suited to the job. Winning new customers, for example, is usually part and parcel of being in the sales and marketing team. Sales in particular is a major focus for most companies as they look to increase revenue, grow their teams, and boost profitability.
The flip side of sales is marketing, they’re really two sides of the same coin. After all, we encounter many companies who are on the look out for new marketing opportunities to leverage and more cost effective means of reaching their target customers.
Some of the contacts we speak to have already heard about inbound marketing and how it can help their business and want to start harnessing its power for their own business’ revenue growth.
However, these contacts aren’t in a purchasing position: they need buy in and sign off from directors or the senior management team. Trouble is, the senior team want results now, and needs a lot of convincing, especially when there’s investment involved.
A good place to start is by distributing a good guide to inbound marketing and then direct your boss to these 7 stats which will give them some solid reasons to consider inbound marketing and also help you sell inbound marketing to your boss.
Stat 1: 59% of companies are prioritising website traffic growth
From the recent State of Inbound report, published each year by HubSpot, well over half of all companies in the report reported that they were prioritising website traffic growth over the coming months.
It’s not hard to see why. Since your business website is often the first port of call for interested buyers, the more people you can attract to your website, the more potential leads and enquires you can generate.
How can inbound marketing help? Part of the inbound philosophy is to create remarkable content, delivered via a blog to attract more visitors to your site. In fact, businesses that blog often, on average, attract up to 60% more traffic than those who don’t.
What’s more, visitors attracted to your site via a blog article are more likely to convert as a lead.
Stat 2: almost half of all businesses are focused on proving the ROI of their marketing
Businesses that perform best when it comes to sales and marketing are the ones who have a detailed understanding of how their sales and marketing teams are performing. Not only in terms of general activity, but also being able to track and, more importantly, measure what actions and activities are working and which are not.
Knowing what’s working and what’s not is vital in order to move forward and improve, as well as being able to prove out how much return the business is seeing on its investment. Well guess what? Inbound marketing is a great way to start seeing an active return on your investment.
Inbound activities are built upon a foundation of specific, measurable actions. Whether you’reusing a management company, such as ours, or using a platform, such as HubSpot, your marketing activities should be performing for you.
Stat 3: content diversification is becoming key in 2016 and beyond
People, and therefore your consumers, are out there for sure, but they’re seeking out and consuming content via a multitude of diverse platforms. Devising and implementing a set of strategies to reach your audience via different media is one thing, being able to track and monitor those interactions and understand the performance of your activities is another.
Using an inbound approach to marketing and employing a platform such as HubSpot will allow you to set SMART goals and monitor progress towards those goals over time much more easily than using lots of different systems haphazardly,
Stat 4: content consumption has increased massively
In the past 2 year period, content consumption increased by a huge margin as consumers hungrily seek out information that speaks to their goals, plans, and challenges. Facebook as seen a 57% increase, Twitter 25% and LinkedIn sits at 21%.
What this means for your business is that if you don’t already have a strong content marketing strategy in place, you’re missing out big time. By producing content that is remarkable, engaging, relevant, and helpful, you’ll be sure to reach more of your target audience earlier in their purchasing process.
Stat 5: 91% of people universally hate interruptive, outbound marketing
Traditional marketing is referred to as outbound, largely because it pushes towards consumers, rather than attracting them as inbound does.
Many larger organisations still operate with a largely outbound strategy because:
- a) this worked in the past and it’s what they’ve always done,
- and b) they have the budget to be able to attack this approach more thoroughly – using a call centre, for example.
The problem is, consumers agree that older, interruptive approaches such as cold calls and ads are becoming increasingly more obnoxious, intrusive, and prevalent, 91% of people surveyed in fact.
If your organisation is still pushing its message and services via these outbound means, by switching to an inbound, content-led approach, you’ll start engaging with your audience in a way which they prefer.
Stat 6: only 17% of marketers reported outbound tactics produced quality leads
Figures from the State of Inbound report show that a meagre 17% of marketers reported that outbound tactics (e.g. cold calling, TV/Outdoor Ads, Trade Shows, purchased lists) produced quality leads. Outbound methods tend to focus on volume and right-time-right-place thinking: with enough people poured into the top of the funnel, you’re bound to get more closed sales, right?
Inbound leads, on the other hand, are much more likely to be of a higher quality as they have converted on your website after self-identifying their needs and almost qualifying themselves at a particular point in the sales process. You know more about their needs and plans based on the content they’ve consumed, which allows you to position yourself as a helpful advisor more easily than by ringing any old number and reading a script.
Stat 7: 83% of people prefer to block ads
People are getting better at tuning out unwanted ads. As the number of pop-up and autoplaying ads rise, people are turning to ad-blockers to stop the disruption. To-date, there have been over 500 million downloads worldwide of Adblock Plus.
The State of Inbound report threw up some other interesting ad-blocking stats:
- 83% of people would like the option to block ads on mobile – (HS Research)
- Mobile ad-blocking is growing 90% year over year – (InformationWeek)
- 429 million people globally use an ad-blocker on their mobile phone
As you can see, by sticking to interruptive advertising methods, not only will you reach less and less of your audience, you may even start to damage your brand’s reputation.
Keep your marketing helpful, informative and always about how you can help the consumer.
CreatedRed
Our team is 100% focussed on delivering the best inbound marketing solution to your creative online marketing needs.
Visit createdredmedia.co.uk for more information
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