Marketing for your company doesn’t have to be something that you shutter thinking about because of the price tag, commitment and different options. If you do marketing right, your strategy can end with results that are out of this world.

Right now you are most likely using old school, out of date marketing tactics. What you need to be doing is signing your company’s name on the dotted line for an inbound marketing strategy.

Why? Because it works.

Inbound marketing focuses on attracting customers through relevant and helpful content that adds value to every stage of the buyer’s journey. With inbound marketing, potential customers find you through channels like blogs, search engines and social media.

Outbound marketing focuses on using interruptive and aggressive marketing tactics like spam emails, print ads and cold calling to fight for the potential customer’s attention.

By putting an end to these disruptive marketing ways, you’re showing your potential customers you care about them and won’t be bombarding them with useless information.

According to the latest State of Inbound report, 46% of companies say that inbound marketing has given their organization higher ROI and 59% of salespeople say inbound marketing practices have provided the highest quality leads for their sales team.

Does Inbound Marketing Work?

As an inbound marketing agency, you guessed it, we think inbound marketing works. But instead of solely taking our word for it, we wanted to share with you other thought leaders opinions and success stories.

What does Brian Halligan, CEO, and founder of HubSpot think?

Stop talking about extracting value from your customers, instead start talking about how you can ADD value to your customers.

Inbound is the way you’re going to add value to your customer. Customers are your stars. If you help them through the buyer’s journey, provide them with educational content and leave them happy, they’ll be shooting through the sky.

How do you know if inbound will work for you?

Now that you’ve heard from Brian Halligan about the need of giving values to your customers through inbound, let’s break down how to know if this type of marketing will work for your company.

Look at your own buying habits

When asking “inbound marketing does it work?”, think of your own buying habits.

How many times have you purchased something straight after watching a commercial on TV, hearing an ad on the radio, getting a spammy email or after driving by a billboard? Probably not often.

Those tactics are too broad to hit you on a personal, emotional level.

Now think about how many times you’ve bought something after doing research on the service or product? What about after you read several positive reviews about it? Probably a lot more than in the first instance. We’re with you.

According to HubSpot, 81% of people research a product online before making a purchase. So, if you are buying something after doing research and reviewing articles online, why wouldn’t you expect your client base to do the same thing?

If you have the time

You can’t agree to an inbound strategy and in two weeks expect groundbreaking results.

In inbound marketing, we say “inbound marketing is a marathon, not a sprint” for this reason. It’s going to take time for you to see the results you’re hoping to see. But through hard work, dedication and trying different inbound tactics, those results can happen.

The first year of an inbound strategy is full of education and learning. Plan to spend a significant amount of time learning the best practices before shooting for the stars and diving into execution. We know our stuff, so we’ll help you with timelines and processes.

Take Red Points for example. The company works with leading publishers, content owners and brands to scan marketplaces, websites and social media to identify trademark and copyright infringements. Red Points is like a space satellite because it’s constantly orbiting around these different platforms, searching.

Red Points wanted to widen its customer base and decided that inbound marketing was the smartest way to go about it.

We then started looking more closely at our inbound strategy. We set up our buyer personas, which range from SMEs to enterprise-level clients, and we added Workflows to nurture them through the pipeline.

Marc Gasso Busquets, Demand Generation Manager at Red Points, knew that inbound marketing wouldn’t give them overnight success, but after the initial phases of his new strategy, they were able to increase leads by 3X, 1,000 new leads were generated every month and there has been a 4X increase in overall website traffic.

We have quite a long sales cycle, and our outbound leads don’t just say ‘yes’ right away. They are reading our content, registering for webinars – our inbound work is helping us to clinch more deals.

Through creating an inbound strategy, Red Points was able to use the length of time as an advantage.

If you figure out who you’re selling to

It’s extremely important to know who you’re selling to. If you don’t know who you’re selling to, then your marketing strategy will be too broad and not personal enough for anyone to grab onto.

Marc mentioned above that he can see his client’s entire journey through the buyer’s process. By creating buyer personas he was able to find out who his clients were, their desired gains from his service and what their pain points were.

After figuring that out, he was able to create content to grab their attention and answer relevant questions they had. Once the questions were answered, Marc was able to walk them through the rest of the buying process.

With HubSpot Marketing Analytics, we’re able to trace our success. We can see the visitor’s entire journey with us, from where they came from to what they have downloaded. We’re not shooting in the dark anymore; we’re refining our content and making smarter, data-driven decisions.

Why Does Inbound Marketing Work?

Inbound marketing uses data-driven tactics to track what is working and what’s not. When something isn’t working, an easy a/b test will help determine how to move forward with being able to complete your companies SMART goals.

Inbound marketing works because you are not interrupting your prospect. You’re becoming visible to them before they even know you. You’re asking for permission instead of aggressively filling their inbox with stuff they don’t want.

Traditional media and marketing tactics are slowly disappearing into a black hole somewhere deep in the abyss. While these tactics still work for some, inbound marketing has taken over for the rest.

32% of companies according to the State of Inbound report share that they find paid advertising like print, billboards and broadcast media to be overrated. Additionally, only 16% of companies find that outbound practices provide them with the highest quality leads.

Does Inbound Marketing Work? Yes or No?

Yes, inbound marketing really does work.

But if you want to see the success like Red Points is floating in, you have to be willing to put in the time, effort and budget to make your inbound marketing mission a success.

Inbound marketing is about creating educational based content that answers your ideal buyer’s questions. Since we mentioned that buyers are turning to articles to answer their questions before buying a product or service (educational content!), it only makes sense for your company to move towards inbound tactics.

If inbound sounds like the right fit for you, check out our other inbound marketing articles. After you finish your research, call us at Roketto. We’d be happy to answer any and all of your inbound questions.