FROM THE 2015 STATE OF INBOUND REPORT

3MAJOR

State of Inbound Report

HubSpot recently released its seventh annual State of Inbound report. The report—which is

divided into marketing and sales sections—consists of 73 pages worth of insights, emerging

trends, and data illuminating the biggest challenges and missed opportunities in the world of

inbound marketing. Including data gathered from over 4,000 survey respondents across

more than 150 countries, the report serves as an accurate representation of the inbound

industry landscape as it currently stands.

We figured you might not have the time to read through 73 pages of material, so we did it

for you. Below, we’ve listed three of the biggest takeaways to note from the marketing

section of HubSpot’s 2015 State of Inbound report.

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Marketers Around The World Prioritize Inbound Marketing

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Marketers Around The World Prioritize Inbound MarketingOne of the most interesting takeaways we pulled from this year’s State of Inbound report is

that a whopping 75 percent of marketers worldwide utilize and prefer inbound marketing

methods to outbound. What’s more, this preference remains consistent across company

types, with inbound marketing appealing to three out of four marketers in B2B, B2C, and

nonprofit businesses. And though larger companies with bigger budgets to spend on paid

advertising continue to prioritize inbound and outbound marketing equally, inbound

continues to remain the core strategy of small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with 0-

200 employees.

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Everyone Agrees: Paid Advertising is a Poor Investment

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Everyone Agrees: Paid Advertising is a Poor InvestmentInbound marketers know that traditional

outbound marketing methods—such as TV

ads and billboards—are a poor investment.

But as it turns out, so do the marketers who

actually use these tactics.

Of the survey respondents whose companies

identify as outbound organizations, 32

percent cited paid advertising as the

marketing tactic they consider the biggest

waste of time. The graph below, pulled from

the State of Inbound report, shows that paid

advertising takes a commanding lead in the

list of most overrated marketing tactics,

followed by social media and email marketing.

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Demonstrating ROI is the #1 challenge marketers face

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Demonstrating ROI is the #1 Challenge Marketers FaceThe State of Inbound report also showed that the biggest obstacle facing marketers is

demonstrating ROI to company executives. However, demonstrating ROI also proved to

correlate positively with a marketing budget increase, exposing a “catch-22” in the inbound

marketing world: Marketers need a bigger budget to better fund the activities that generate

ROI, but they need to be able to demonstrate ROI to get that bigger budget approved by

higher ups.

So what can marketers do? The key is to track ROI from the beginning (or start now!), which

will provide you with the proof you need to justify a future increase in budget. The report

showed that marketing automation software can play a big role in a marketer’s inbound

success, noting that marketers who saw a higher ROI in 2014 were more likely to have used

marketing automation software than not, and to see an increase in budget the following year

as a result.

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If you need assistance unlocking your own inbound marketing potential with an innovative

strategy or quality content production, contact us at SevenAtoms Inc.

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