Inbound marketing may be old hand to the B2B world, but some marketers still aren’t sold on it. The idea is simple—create content specifically designed to appeal to your dream customer. The practice—building a strategy, crafting content, and integrating tactics—can take more time and effort than traditional marketing efforts and can lead to frustration.
To get a better grip on inbound marketing and how industry insiders view the channel, data management services provider NetProspex, in partnership with Ascend2, surveyed 270 marketing and sales professionals to ascertain how they’re currently using inbound marketing and their plans for more effectively leveraging it in 2015.
The results of the “Inbound Marketing B2B” survey show that there’s an abundance of room for improvement for the channel. Consider, for example, the fact that only 27% of marketers responded “very successful” when asked about inbound marketing’s ability to achieve important objectives highlights. Establishing a meaningful, two-way conversation requires insight into who your buyers are, what characteristics define them, and what actions they take in response to your offers. This can work wonders when compared to the generic, broad-brush messages the average marketer sends, the survey said.
Easier said than done, however. Here, some challenges to inbound marketing:
Creating inbound marketing content is not only one of the most effective tactics used, it’s also the most difficult to execute. Here, the most effective and the most difficult inbound tactics to execute are juxtaposed:
The most important objective for inbound marketing in 2015, marketers said, is improving lead quality (50%). Increasing sales revenue (48%), increasing conversion rates (48%), and increasing lead quality (45%) are all imperative too, say marketers surveyed.
Running a tight inbound marketing ship takes time and effort—both of which are not always available to the average marketing team. One way to avoid this obstacle is to outsource tactics to inbound experts; they can break down an audience into segments to determine the most profitable targets, advocates, and key influencers. More than half of marketers (55%) outsource some or all of their inbound campaigns, according to the survey, while 41% use in-house resources only and 4% outsource to an agency or consultancy.
