This is a question many of you may be asking, and you will be right to. Social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn are very useful tools, indeed. But your business will only gain the kind of competitive advantage that inbound marketing can provide if they are part of a broader transformation.
I got the idea of inbound marketing as a competitive advantage from a recent workshop in which Bill Aulet, Managing Director of MIT Entrepreneurship Center, described the three core benefits that inbound marketing brings to businesses:
- Lowering the cost of customer acquisition (LCCA)
- Developing the capability to rapidly respond to your prospects, customers and markets
- Creating the ability to learn from your prospects, customers and markets to provide them with the innovation they crave.
In an ideal world you would be able to build brand awareness, increase authority and generate more leads through the power of organic search and social media engagement. Unfortunately, in the crowded milieu of the web, and with millions of Google Number One contenders, these organic activities sometimes don’t suffice. Here’s where social media advertising comes in.
Yes, you’ll need to pay a little extra but think about the benefits: your website gaining better visibility and your message getting straight to your target customer. If you could afford it, we definitely recommend spicing up your marketing activities with a dollop of social media ads… in addition to your daily nuggets of search engine optimisation, social media interaction and blogging, of course.
So what are the best advertising channels on the internet? Today we present a close-up of traditional Google pay-per-click campaigns and LinkedIn ads.
Econsultancy’s Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing found that even though companies are generally happy to embrace content marketing, the majority are still learning the ropes. Nearly half of the survey respondents admit they have not quite mastered the art of digital marketing, with only 21% saying they are “excellent” or “good” at it.
What is the reason behind these statistics? Why are you not converting leads to clients when you tweet every day, blog three times a week and regularly update your Facebook Business Page?
According to the report, while some companies have reaped the benefits of a ‘just do it’ attitude to social media engagement, many have held back from it due to the challenges of measuring the effect of social media interaction on brand sentiment.
While it is understandable that CFOs in general would still be reluctant to fork out money on activities that lack tangible value, there are in fact tools that can precisely gauge the impact of company blogs and social media engagement on brand awareness and sentiment.
As audiences get increasingly adept at blocking out these ‘interruptive’ – and quite possibly annoying – commercial messages, outbound marketing as we know it is fast losing ground.
So is there a better way to spend your marketing £££?
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Key Results
Brightfire has worked closely with Firefish Software to help them become an early adopter of Inbound Marketing & Hubspot marketing software within UK market. Through using a range of Inbound Marketing techniques supported by the Hubspot marketing platform Firefish has taken a new recruitment software product to market, building their online audience, generating leads and achieving a significant cost saving per lead (84%). (more…)
