What the Heck is Inbound Marketing and Why is it so Important?

There is an excellent description of what “inbound” or “pull” marketing is over at the Hubspot blog today, Inbound Marketing & the Next Phase of Marketing on the Web.

In a nutshell, they define it as "...marketing focused on getting found by customers." They put SEO, blogs, and social media into this bucket. I would put PPC advertising in there as well. After all, PPC is all about figuring out what your prospects are going to be searching for and then making sure you are there when they find it.

The problem with portions of conventional inbound marketing efforts, specifically SEO and PPC, is that while there is a great deal of effort involved in making sure that people find you, most of the people (some estimates are as high as 95%) that DO find you never fill out a form or let you know they are out there, looking.

This fits in nicely with the direction we are going here at Demandbase. Our new (and free!) desktop widget, Demandbase Stream, sits on your computer desktop and acts like a stock ticker - only instead of stocks you can see the names of the companies that are on your website right now (as well as the search terms they used to find you). Simple connections to both LinkedIn as well as our own database of more than 5 million business contacts help you to make the connections you need at the companies that are looking for your products or services.

We also have a more advanced and complete web traffic monitoring tool that is in pre-release right now. Feel free to drop me a line at jstewart@demandbase.com if you are interested in learning more.

One of my colleagues here put it nicely. "We identify the ‘Silent Majority’ of people clicking on a company’s search ads, who meet their target profile, but do not convert (and are therefore not identified). We enable the advertiser to take the next step and reach out to these qualified prospects through a focused marketing effort (targeted email campaign or possibly direct sales rep call), helping them maximize the dollars they’ve already spent on paid search."

In other words, a nice one-two punch of both inbound and outbound marketing.

With budgets being tight, and with B2B companies changing the way they market to drive traffic to their various presences on the web, they simply can’t afford not to know who the traffic is, how they found you and what they were looking for.

Comments

[Rick Burnes]

Jason, Thanks for pointing to my post. I agree with you. PPC probably does fit under the mantle of inbound marketing in a lot of circumstances. It is a way to show up when potential customers are looking for you, as opposed to interrupting them when they're not.

That said, I didn't include it here because I think that people are going to find PPC a less and less efficient means of inbound marketing. PPC is an investment with a fixed return; consistent content creation is an investment with increasing returns over time as it builds a long tail of organic search traffic.

[Jason Stewart]

Rick, with the proper tools to continually monitor and shape the ROI of PPC at the keyword level PPC has the potential to continually grow and evolve just as SEO does. Where it becomes less efficient is when people get focused on clicks and conversion as their measurement of success rather than cost per selling opportunity and revenue at the keyword or ad group level.

That being said, nothing will replace the importance of natural search and content creation to hit those long tail searchers that are so much more valuable (and likely farther along in the buying cycle). Our most valuable leads come from organic search, without question. But even those leads come and go from your site without filling out forms 95% of the time. That's why it is so important to have a handle on monitoring your web traffic for target businesses.

The perfect combination is to have your ads show up both in the organic results AND the paid results. Studies...I think from Enquiro? have shown that. They're the ones who did the really nice eye tracking heat map study looking at how people use google search...