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Inbound Marketing Effectiveness Report

Are inbound marketing tactics alone adequate to grow a business? This study’s goal was to find out. There is no shortage of research and opinion about the efficacy of inbound marketing. Inbound marketing activities are designed to attract a prospect to your destination, offer or experience whereas outbound activities rely on the company reaching into the market to engage with prospects who may not know about the company yet. Over the last decade, marketers have enthusiastically embraced the term “inbound,” and have reaped its benefits. The popularity of inbound marketing may lead some to conclude that outbound marketing is not as effective. Marketers, whose resources are often challenged by where to best invest their budgets: in inbound marketing, a strategy whose fortunes continue to rise, or in outbound, the more traditional strategy that holds it weight in performance. This study provides insights into what marketers say they’re doing and where they’re investing. To get these insights, Demand Metric and Act-On Software partnered to field this study’s survey. The approach to this research was not to take a view that inbound and outbound strategies and tactics were on opposite sides of a political divide, or that one was right and the other wrong. The research did not attempt to ascribe qualities or benefits to either approach, but simply measure them. The goal was to inventory the tactics in use, the proclivity to use one, the other or both, and to understand the investment and performance of each. This report presents the findings of this research, providing all marketers with a useful set of benchmarks to compare their use of these approaches.

Spotlight

Bombora

Bombora signifies the sea of data that our cooperative creates and the waves of demographic and intent data that we aggregate, organize and activate for sales teams and marketers. We are the first aggregated source of behavioral Intent Data for B2B, creating a “first of its kind” data cooperative of premium B2B Media Companies. The company's Content Consumption Monitoring technology fuels this Intent Data Cooperative, which empowers marketers to more efficiently monetize their businesses, delivering data for use cases throughout the sales and marketing funnel. With solutions driven by demographic & intent data, marketers can communicate to customers with relevant messages at every stage of their journey to drive breakthrough engagements.

OTHER WHITEPAPERS

How Content Distribution Enhances Data Clean-Up Efforts

whitePaper | May 14, 2021

A lead generation campaign presents exciting opportunities for a company pursuing growth, but erroneous data can produce disappointing results or worse: high cost with little to no return on investment. Cleansing your data is a necessary phase step, but is not a “one and done” activity. Read the whitepaper to learn how leveraging a data provider and your own content distribution efforts can help you not only reach your audience but keep your data accurate at the same time.

The B2B CFO’s Guide to Revenue Forecasting and Efficient Growth

whitePaper | March 9, 2023

When the economy falters, buyer behavior changes. But the key questions CFOs always ask are: By how much? And how much will it affect the sales pipeline, the lifeblood of the business? To maintain a healthy balance sheet, it’s critical for CFOs to get those answers right. And that’s where things get tricky. When CFOs trim budgets with a too-heavy hand, they can cripple the business’ future growth. Conversely, if they don’t trim enough, the business can bleed out.

ABM 2.0: 3 Paths to More Productive Revenue Capture in a Changing Interaction Landscape

whitePaper | September 12, 2022

With face-to-face touchpoints being replaced by virtual interactions, learn how to succeed in this new landscape. B2B marketers need to scale up ABM 1.0 principles to generate more revenue from a larger number of target accounts. In this white paper, ABM 2.0: 3 Paths to More Productive Revenue Capture in a Changing Interaction Landscape, we discuss how changes in B2B interaction are impacting relationship-creation and how you can use intent data to connect buyers to the solutions they need.

2022 G2 Software Buyer Behavior Report

whitePaper | December 21, 2022

The B2B technology world is built on a foundation of trust. A glut of software options and a lack of credible content in a perpetual buying cycle of increasing complexity make building trust with buyers more difficult than ever. G2’s 2022 Software Buyer Behavior Report illustrates the crisis of trust in the market today and the avenues through which sellers can empower a diverse slate of buyers with the information they need.

The Modern Marketer’s Guide to ABM

whitePaper | May 31, 2021

In this eBook we will address the evolution of the B2B purchase journey and discuss the fundamentals of starting a successful ABM program in our “Ready-Set-Go” framework. B2B sales and marketing is constantly evolving and adapting to new advances in technology, and following traditional lead generation in the information age is no longer the most efficient approach to generating pipeline. ABM prioritizes quality over quantity, so sales and marketing can allocate more resources and time on high-fit, high-intent target accounts. When buyers show interest in your product early in the purchase journey, account-based technology can put these signals right at the fingertips of your marketing and sales organizations.

2020 MARKETING OUTLOOK

whitePaper | December 10, 2019

The “wealth effect” the idea that consumer and business spending goes up with increases in stock prices, could taper with a downturn in the stock market. With the upcoming political year, it is highly likely that investors will cash out of some of their returns in early 2020, which could result in slower consumer and business spending in the early part of the year. Both B2B and B2C buyers might focus on “must haves” and delay the purchase of “nice to haves” until mid-year.

Inbound Marketing Effectiveness Report