How Inbound Marketing Reduces The Cost of Lead Generation

Inbound Marketing is known to be the superset of many marketing activities that include SEO, blogging, and social media. Inbound marketing is all about discovery and creating relevant content for your target audience that answers their questions. Outbound marketing techniques include directly calling up customers from a pre-acquired database, direct mails, events, and telemarketing. Outbound methods have been used for a long time now and is known as a method where a company pushes the message to the prospects whether they have a query for their product or not.

A survey conducted by HubSpot with a sample survey respondents in 2013, gave the conclusion that it costs 61% less for businesses that have inbound marketing dominated operations as compared to the organizations that predominantly used outbound marketing.

The most compelling data points that were collected from the research are as follows:

– Twice as many marketers surveyed said that inbound marketing delivered below average cost per lead than outbound strategies.
– Survey also found that 34% of the overall leads that were generated came from inbound marketing strategies.
– Out of these leads, Inbound delivered 54% qualified leads into the marketing funnel than traditional outbound tactics which is pretty impressive.
– In 2013, 41% of the marketers confirmed that Inbound marketing delivered better ROI.
– A whopping 82% of the marketers who blog saw positive ROI for their inbound marketing.
– For U.S. marketers who spent more than $25K per year in inbound marketing saved an average of 13% of the overall cost per lead and more than $14 per new customer that was acquired versus those marketers who relied heavily on outbound marketing strategies.

These marketers who revealed their success stories also stated that it’s not enough to do Inbound marketing and implementing the strategy. To see results the minimum time period required was 8-12 months and you need to deeply commit yourself to the model and optimize it continually for optimum results.

These marketers revealed that with Inbound marketing they dedicated a high level of time, commitment and resources to get things right. It sure is not an easy fix and won’t help by hiring any expert in Inbound marketing until there is commitment at all levels.

These findings also reveal that all the businesses should discard their outbound marketing strategies right away. Rather, it is highly important that companies realize that what they want to achieve out of their marketing spend. In order to do that it is essential that they strive for balance between both the strategies- Inbound and Outbound. This can be well achieved if the marketing funnel is closely monitored and by that I mean from the time time the first lead comes in and by the time it travels to the bottom of the funnel and becomes a customer.

We had an opportunity to have a look at another great article on Salesforce website, and they listed down five easy steps on how your company can reduce the cost per lead.

Five Steps to reduce the Cost Per Lead

Studying the Sales Funnel

Having an understanding about where the lead is currently traversing in the sales funnel will help your marketing team to optimize the strategy to make sure that the lead converts into sales. Depending on the level in the sales funnel the lead is in, marketers should optimize the strategy.

Commitment to Content Marketing

As we stated above, that 82% of the marketers who blog saw positive ROI. So there is no doubt that by carefully analyzing about what the prospects want and creating content around it will surely help in achieving your ROI goals. Content marketing extends from blogging, ebooks, case studies, white papers, infographics and content for social media sites.

Marketing Automation

Lead nurturing is the process that is well taken care of by B2B companies that use marketing automation for the process. According to HubSpot report, businesses using marketing automation tools saw 451% increase in their qualified leads. Targeting new prospects or existing customers by sending them optimized content based on their previous activity on your website. Sending them e-mails, sharing new blogs are some of the responses that can be given to a prospect. Make sure to provide the Call-To-Actions at the end or in the middle of your content so that prospects can easily go through your products or services after going thru your content.

Optimize for organic search

According to a report by kapost, a B2B customer on an average conducts 12 searches before making a decision to buy a product or service or not. Today’s prospects are very well educated and rather self-educated and hence providing them content that is optimized for keywords that your target audience is searching for is a great step to take. Even though, pay-per-click campaigns may increase immediate traffic to your website but continuously striving for optimized content is what marketers should do.

Maintaining your Social Media

Marketing through Social Media channels has emerged to be a very cost effective and easy way to connect and communicate to your customers. Sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other social media channels let you grow your business potential and reach out to even bigger clientele. The only thing that needs to be taken care of is that deciding on which channel suits best your business and focussing on reaching out to customers on that particular platform instead of forcefully making an account on all the social media channels that are known about.

Courtesy: http://www.iamwire.com/2016/04/inbound-marketing-reduces-cost-lead-generation/134717