Blogging is Vital to Internet and Inbound Marketing for Small Businesses

The State of Inbound Marketing, a report by http://www.hubspot.com/recently revealed the following about Internet marketing or specifically inbound marketing as it is more commonly being called today:

#1 Utilizing keyword strategy and appearing for customers on the Internet when they search (go inbound) offers much better results than the traditional outbound marketing strategies we all grew up with that seek to interrupt the consumer with commercials and other types of media  sales messages.
#2 Blogs lead all other social media categories as an inbound marketing strategy for businesses of all sizes. Blogs are frequently cited as the most useful type of social media marketing, far outpacing advertising, with 75% of those familiar with their business’ blogging efforts saying they are ‘useful,’ ‘important,’ or ‘critical’ to their business.
#3  Inbound marketing delivers a dramatically lower cost-per-sales lead than other kinds of advertising and marketing because it utilizes key word search strategies that buyers already looking for a particular product or service.                                                                             Respondents that spent more than 50% of their marketing budget on inbound marketing consistently reported a lower cost-per-sales lead than those that spent 50% or more on outbound marketing. In fact, Internet or inbound marketing-dominated organizations experience a 61% lower cost-per-lead than outbound or traditional marketing-dominated organizations.
Businesses are responding by allocating a greater portion of their budget to Internet/inbound marketing which include search engine optimization techniques. Currently, 37% of business’ lead-generation budget is dedicated to inbound marketing, whereas 30% is dedicated to outbound marketing efforts. Hubspot expects this gap to widen significantly over time.
#4 Small businesses are most aggressively allocating lead generation budgets to blogging, social media and search engine optimization.
Realizing that inbound marketing techniques ‘level the playing field’ with the bigger budgets of larger competitors, small businesses are spending a 180% greater portion of their budgets on blogging/social media and 36% greater portion of their budgets on search engine optimization than businesses with 50 employees or more.
If you need help setting up a blog or researching blog content that is relevant for your customers as a part of your Internet Marketing strategy,  contact us at Oakcreek Marketplace Web Design and Internet Marketing.