Inbound marketing is powerful but complex. Mike Lieberman, as an expert in the topic and head of Square 2 Marketing, recently helped us makes sense of a tough topic.

Why is inbound marketing important for businesses?

First, inbound marketing should be important to businesses because it’s the only marketing strategy that aligns perfectly with the new buyer behavior. We, as consumers, don’t want to be interrupted. We’ve all agreed that we don’t want to watch TV commercials, read direct mail, answer our phones, or see ads in our magazines. We’ve created technology like DVRs, satellite radio, caller ID and online magazines so that we won’t be interrupted anymore. No one likes getting cold calls, yet businesses keep using that old tactic and expect it to work. It’s insanity. Business have to adopt inbound marketing if they want to earn their audience’s attention, because the days of renting it are over.

What are some strengths of inbound marketing that businesses may not be aware of?

One of the major strengths is that it’s highly efficient. There isn’t a lot of waste like there is in traditional advertising. Almost everything we do with inbound is one-to-one, so the prospect has asked for it and is open to hearing the message. The other major strength of inbound marketing is that everything is quantifiable. This means we know, in real-time, what’s working and what’s not working as well as it could be. This means we’re able to optimize the program, also in real-time, weekly and month over month. This delivers a level of continuous improvement never before attainable with traditional marketing tactics.

Why is content so important for inbound marketing?

People want to make safe purchase decisions. Today, we use the web to get educated way in advance of wanting to talk to anyone. Content allows us as marketers to deliver educational information to our prospects at all stages of their buyer journey. It allows us to connect with them emotionally, which is how humans make purchase decisions: emotionally at first and then rationally later. Content allows us to tell stories, to paint a picture of what life will be like once we’re able to solve our prospect’s challenges. We can use multimedia like video to deliver these stories and create rich, interactive experiences for our prospects; pulling them into our world and getting them excited about working with us. That’s the essence of inbound marketing.

Can every business benefit from inbound marketing? Why or why not?

Yes, every business can benefit from inbound marketing because in the end, marketing is not about B2B, B2C or B2 anything. It’s about H2H: human 2 huma. And when you look at it like that, we all want to be marketed to the same way: the inbound way. We don’t want to be sold; we want to be helped, coached, advised and counseled. Inbound marketing provides the tools, the strategy, the platform and the methodology to earn your prospects’ attention; and that creates the ability to nurture those prospects and turn them into leads, and then eventually new customers of your business.

What are some good metrics for measuring the success of inbound marketing and why?

Great question. Inbound marketers are obsessed with metrics. Here is what we look at for our clients.
Overall website visitors. Is this number going up month over month?
Site wide conversion rate. This needs to be between 1% and 3%. The difference between the high end and the low end is monumental when site traffic is up 10x in an engagement.
Of course, we are looking at leads. We want this number going up month over month too.
When we dig into a client’s program, we are looking at where visitors are coming from. How many are coming from organic, referral sources, social media, email marketing, or directly to their site?
We are also looking at how many leads are coming from all those sources. We look at the individual performance of content. How effective are the CTA buttons and the landing pages at turning visitors into leads?
In addition, we look at the performance of blog content. How many people are viewing individual blog articles? How many are converting into leads from those blog articles? And how many back links are those articles generating?
Finally, we look at social reach. Are we increasing the friends, followers and connections on a monthly basis?

What’s the future of inbound marketing?

Another great question. The future is very bright for inbound marketing. In a number of years, it’s all you’ll do. It won’t be a question of, “do we want inbound?” It’s going to be, “how do we implement inbound at our business?” It will be the de facto way you market your company – hands down, no question. In addition, it won’t only be inbound marketing; it’s going to be inbound sales too. We’ve already seen marketing and sales come together and require a unified approach. Instead of a marketing department and a sales department, you’re going to have a revenue department. After all, you can’t earn a prospect’s attention with an educational approach and then turn that beautiful lead over to a pushy sales person. Forget it. We already have seen clients who have squandered the leads we’ve gotten them by turning them over to traditional sales people who have turned off the prospects and pushed them away. Over time, this is going to change too.

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