Businesses spending 50% or more of their marketing budget on inbound marketing activities spent 60% less per lead than businesses spending 50% or more of their marketing budget on outbound channels. This number is remarkably consistent with the 61% lower cost businesses reported a year ago. Clearly, inbound marketing channels are maintaining their low-cost advantage.
– Brian Halligan, Hubspot
Changing Consumer Behaviour Requires New Marketing Techniques
Conventional lead generation strategies – half page print ads, cold calling, trade show stands, directory advertising – have started to wear thin with the average small business owner. Symptomatic of the changing times, Yellow Pages now offer a suite of online services, and their famous directory has shrunk to a small A5 offering. You don't really have to reflect too hard to understand the reasons for the decline of the old school marketing methods. These days, with self-publishing on the web a bare click or two away, small businesses can advertise for much less, and the results and return on investment tend to be significantly better. Hubspot, who conduct extensive market research on online trends, have catalogued the shift from so-called outbound to inbound marketing, and the figures are fairly compelling. Most notably, the last three years, 2008-2011, have witnessed a significant shift by all sectors away from old-fashioned outbound marketing, (e.g. telemarketing, trade shows, mail shots, paid advertising), towards inbound marketing techniques, (e.g. blogs, social media, and seo). Businesses are shifting their strategies in line with evolving technologies, it's as simple as that.
Not only are consumers tired of being told what to think and to buy, new technologies have empowered them to cut out interruption advertising channels, (primarily through TV, Radio, and Internet Ad-Blocking services), and at the same time empowered them to exercise more consumer choice and discernment, primarily through the use of the search engines. In fact with so much information now available to us in an instant, it is not only our consumer and social behaviour that has changed, our entire cerebral processes appear to be altering. People are no longer using their memories to retain vital information, they have now deferred that part of their brains to Google's compendious filing system. Our very mindsets and cognitive processes have changed, and with them our susceptibility to conventional advertising techniques has diminished. A man on TV shouting at us about the latest domestic innovation, or a limited-time bargain, has much less psychological traction these days, because we know a world of bargains and innovations is just two clicks away, and with the world of online search comes a world of research; once online, we can analyze, evaluate, run quality and price comparisons, and basically shop to our heart's content. TV for instance has gone from being the dominant media form, to just one amongst a plurality of media channels. Indeed, with so much information now available, we are suffering more than anything from information overload; consumers consequently are becoming skilled at disregarding superfluous information, and honing in on what really matters. In this environment, a prime time TV advert is just one more piece of pixelated animated data, fighting for our consideration in the hope it won't be jettisoned as information ballast. Furthermore, coupled with all these prevalent trends, we have a new generation of consumers who simply wouldn't recognize the Yellow Pages if you beat them over the head with it, who see newspapers as a threat to the forests, and who fit TV around their hectic Facebook and Playstation schedules. So all in all, it's not really rocket science to see why businesses are migrating their lead generation strategies away from the traditional outbound methods, towards social media, blogs and search engine optimization.
So how has your business responded to the new ways of marketing?
The basic premise of inbound marketing is that, in order to be found and to generate sales leads, you must put yourself in the path of people who are asking about, shopping in, and investigating your industry. You must create a central hub for your business, normally a website, and then create channels that lead back to that central hub. Once you master this approach, you will find that the leads you open yourself up to will be of much higher value, much more qualified and likely expecting to pay a premium because they have convinced themselves that you are the solution to their problem.
At the entry level, inbound marketing properties can be created for absolutely nothing. However, even allowing for professional skills, e.g. a professionally designed and served website, a coherent social media strategy, an ongoing seo and lead generation campaign, your campaigns can be considerably less financially prohibitive than certain other outmoded advertising channels. Of course, unlike a Yellow Pages advert which lasted a year, (strictly speaking), or a TV or Radio advert which might run for a few weeks or months, your social media and website properties are in perpetuity. Provided you maintain them and keep them up to date, they are there working for you 24/7, 365 days of the year, for the foreseeable future. Likewise an seo campaign, whilst it will normally involve an ongoing element, should still create ongoing durable ranking results for you, even if the campaign were to stop overnight.
Where We Fit In
Orange Whale can help you build a powerful seo campaign, allowing you to tap into the search queries in your industry. Not only that, we can help you to use your social media properties and blog content to engage with your market, and give them the level of dynamic interaction which will help them to establish you as a vital point of reference for them. We can also help you to optimize your website for conversions, in many ways the most critical pillar of your online strategy. The keys to a successful inbound marketing strategy are to create interesting content, and to reach your potential market wherever they are. The combination of these two elements should allow you to dramatically boost your overall marketing results.
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