The last few weeks have been pretty funky in the sales and marketing space. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff got basically booted from Oracle's OpenWorld conference. Small-business software company Hubspot in a karaoke RV, proclaiming responsibility for a continent-wide unicorn shortage, and touting videos of profanity-spewing cartoon unicorns. Although this was clearly a joke, it was a pretty great kickoff for their Marketing Fact vs. Marketing Fantasy campaign (the link connects to their recent eBook on the same topic).
The one topic that I keep hearing about, recently, is that sales and marketing automation is dead, or at least impersonal. Well, let's take a moment to look at the facts from a few of these unicorn videos, so you can make some decisions for yourself.
One note: "inbound marketing" is when you, or your company, makes really great content that's aligned with your customer's "buy cycle" to make the customer come to you, not the other way around. Let's go over a few of the key facts from the HubSpot eBook, so you can make a decision about this, yourself
- Inbound marketing leads cost 62% less than traditional outbound leads
- 54% of marketers increased their inbound marketing budgets this year
- 39% of B2B companies who used Twitter have gotten new customers from it, and the number from Facebook is higher - 41%
- Your email database is going bad at a rate of 25% per year
- Your email marketing is getting pushed out of customer inboxes by Postini and Gmail Priority inbox
- Tradeshows are one of the most expensive ways to get new leads
- Free trials demonstrate product value, and increase conversion ratios
- Companies than blog get 55% more web traffic than those that don't.
- They also get 70% more leads
- 57% of those companies have gotten a new customer from a blog
This is just the tip of the iceberg. To learn more, download the eBook from the link above. You might dig it.