Every marketer knows it’s the age of the customer! So this means us marketers need to give our savy customers what they want and when they want it in order to effectively engage with them. According to a survey carried out earlier this year by Crain Research Insights and sponsored by Aprimo, 59% of respondents reported that they viewed Inbound Marketing more effective than Outbound Marketing when engaging with customers and prospects.
It makes perfect sense that Inbound Marketing should be key to successful customer engagement. It is non-intrusive as it targets customers when they reach out to a company — whether through calls, retail touch points or online – and a company responds with presenting a perfectly timed and perfectly appropriate offer based on the current interaction.
Furthermore, according to Adam Sarner, Gartner, Inc. 2012:“Skillfully executed inbound marketing (real-time decisioning) has shown 10 times more conversion rates than traditional outbound marketing initiatives and 3-5 x better than progressive event-based marketing efforts.”
Yet here is the surprising fact – only 4% of respondents said they had fully integrated real-time inbound methods into their sales and marketing initiatives. And marketers in general have been slow on the uptake – 37% reported that they had not integrated real-time marketing technologies with their sales and marketing units at all.
EVENT: We actually found these stats so interesting that we have organised a breakfast briefing focusing on Inbound Marketing (15 Aug, Landmark Hotel, London) to discuss the basic concepts of Inbound Marketing, the technology behind it, best practices, and how to achieve an ROI from Inbound Marketing initiatives. Our guest speaker Vince Bowie is a senior management consultant, who has held executive management positions at organisations such as Wells Fargo, Citibank and HSBC bringing with him many years of experience and best practices. His areas of specialisation include amongst others CRM and Inbound Marketing.
The event is FREE to attend so please join us for this discussion / overview on Inbound Marketing. I would love to hear from fellow marketers how they are incorporating Inbound Marketing into their mix!
Find out more and register for the event.
