There is a lot of talk about the effectiveness of different types of online marketing. At Image Media Partners we believe that inbound marketing is the most effective. For inbound marketing an organization or business publishes valuable, useful information on their website and promotes it through social media and keyword optimization that attracts visitors to their websites. Once visitors are on the website they can opt in to follow a blog, sign up for a newsletter or download an eBook. Once signed up the organization can now nurture these leads and turn those that are interested into customers.

How do we know Inbound Marketing is effective?

Recently HubSpot crunched the data from over 4,000 of its customers to see how effective inbound marketing really is. To measure success they looked at how effective several inbound marketing techniques were at increasing web traffic and capturing leads. A lead is not a customer but someone who signed up for a newsletter, downloaded an eBook or in some way indicated that they were interested by leaving at least their name and e-mail. The study looked at five inbound marketing activities:

• Blogging
• Web Pages
• Landing Pages
• Social Media Activity on Twitter
• Social Media Activity on Facebook

Not surprisingly the websites that were more active doing inbound marketing activities had more leads. Some of the highlights include:

• Businesses with over 1,000 Twitter followers had over 6 times more traffic than those with less than 25 followers.
• B2C businesses with over 1,000 Twitter followers had over 10 times more leads then those with less than 25 followers.
• B2C businesses with over 1,000 Facebook fans got 16 times more leads then those with less than 25 fans.
• Businesses that blogged 16 to 20 times a month had 2 times more traffic while businesses that blogged more than 20 times a month had 5 times more traffic than businesses that blogged less than 4 times a month.
• Businesses with more than 200 blogs got 3.5 times more leads then business with less than 20 blogs.

There is not enough space here to go into a lot of detail but what soon becomes clear is that frequency, amount and reach is important. In other words it is not enough to put up an occasional blog. Bloggers who post once a week get more traffic than those who post once a month. Businesses that post blogs everyday get much more website traffic and leads than those who post blogs twice a week. For more information, statistics and charts download the eBook: Lead Generation Lessons from 4,000 Business. 

Graph curtesy of HubSpot