20 Reasons to Try Inbound Marketing for Your Small Business

These 20 stats are from HubSpot’s 2013 State of Inbound Marketing report (I cherry picked from a list of 150 the ones I thought most relevant to small business owners). Enjoy, and feel free to send me questions about anything related to Inbound. If I don’t know the answer, I will research and get back to you pronto!

1. 82% of marketers who blog daily acquired a customer using their blog, as opposed to 57% of marketers who blog monthly — which, by itself, is still impressive.
2. 79% of companies that have a blog report a positive return on investment for inbound marketing this year.
3. Company blogs produced a customer for 43% of marketers in 2013.
4. Just 20% of companies without a blog reported ROI from inbound marketing in 2013.
5. While blogs require roughly 9% of marketers’ total full-time staff dedications, they also demand just 7% of marketers’ total budget outlay this year.
6. Social media requires just 10% more effort, on average, than most traditional marketing roles.
7. 52% of all marketers generated a lead from Facebook in 2013.
8. 74% said Facebook is important to their lead generation strategy in 2013.
9. 43% of marketers generated a customer from LinkedIn in 2013.
10. 36% of marketers found a new customer from Twitter this year.
11. 48% of marketers will increase their inbound marketing budget in 2013 — the 3rd year in a row inbound budgets are increasing at or near a 50% pace.
12. 45% of B2B companies increased marketing budgets due to past inbound success.
13. Outbound budgets continue their annual decline, amounting to just 23% of all marketing spending in 2013.
14. SEO is one of the top lead generation sources, with 25% of marketers finding it produces a below average cost per lead this year.
15. SEO consumes an average of 9% of marketers’ overall time, and its leads convert to sales at an industry leading 15% — 50% better than trade shows, the leading traditional marketing channel.
16. Of the 27% of marketers who bought an email list in 2013, just 9% said it was very effective.
17. 34% of the leads marketers generate in 2013 come from inbound marketing sources — vs. 22% from outbound.
18. Inbound marketing delivers 54% more leads into the marketing funnel than traditional outbound leads.
19. Companies that test their marketing are 75% more likely to show ROI for inbound marketing than those that ignore testing.
20. 46% of marketers use Google Analytics’ free reporting.