When you hear a couple of flies buzzing around the house, do you chase them with a rolled up newspaper?

Or do you put a dollop of jam on a saucer and wait for them to appear?

One approach demands a lot more energy. Yet spooning out the jam can get far faster results.

And this really is the essence of ‘inbound marketing’, a term you’ve probably heard bandied around a lot recently.

Of course, buzzwords are nothing new in marketing. Back in the 50s, Bates originated the ‘Unique Selling Proposition’. Since then (and probably long before), marketing has been awash with magic formulae which have promised to deliver customers and loyalty in equal measure.

But Inbound Marketing has an edge in the way it uses the Internet to turn the tables. It encourages  customers to find you instead of you hunting for them using traditional and costly marketing campaigns.

In a nutshell, Inbound Marketing is any campaign that tempts interest in a product or service by offering relevant online information. In effect, it uses the likes of blogs, e-books, infographics, whitepapers etc., as bait.

Potential customers with an interest in the general area served by your product or service conduct their research online. So to connect with them, you make relevant information easily avalable via SEO, social media etc.

They’ll come to you rather than you going to them. And because they’re doing most of the hard work, it’s far more cost-effective.

Of course, slapping out any old bait won’t necessarily work. Since your potential customers are already on the hunt for something resembling your product or service, your SEO needs to be up to scratch and focused–but that’s a subject for another blog.

Here we’re talking about why organisations should add inbound to their marketing repertoire. As with any other marketing question, the ultimate arbiter must be return on investment.

So does inbound marketing actually get results? Yes–but it’s not an instant sale.

Our partner Hubspot researched this question las February and reported the following:

• 92.34% of companies using inbound marketing increase their traffic
• 92.7% of companies using inbound marketing increase their lead generation
• 42.2% of companies using inbound marketing increase their lead-to-sale conversion rate

But if you’re twitchy for immediate results, don’t pin all your hopes on inbound marketing. Remember that this is a slow-burn strategy; as another statistic from Hubspot confirms, you may have to wait a while:

• 85% of companies using inbound marketing increase traffic within 7 months

If your boss is screaming for sales, inbound marketing may not be the cure-all you’re looking for.

But if you want a smart, cost-effective strategy to get customers knocking on your door, then it’s well worth cracking open the jam jar to see if you can create a buzz…

Abstract

What can inbound marketing really offer organisations? The answer is solid results without the cost of traditional marketing campaigns. The secret lies in tempting customers to reach you by offering relevant, high-quality and easy-to-find content. Research has shown that over 92% of companies using inbound marketing increase their traffic.

Des Columb
Creative Director

Check out who is the latest fan of their new book “The Gathering – Reflections on Ireland”. Former President Bill Clinton was presented with a copy of the book by An Taoiseach at Leinster House yesterday!

Founded by the energetic Prof Dylan Evans Jones, The Wales Fast Growth 50 has become the established award that entrepreneurial businesses in Wales aspire to. The annual gala dinner was held last week in Cardiff with a full house of 500 guests and has developed into the largest Welsh business event of the year.

Over 25,000 jobs and an estimated £14billion of additional turnover is delivered annually by these up-and-coming companies, much of which is spent in their local area. Yet despite this success, much remains to be done to turn fast-growing firms into super-growth companies that can have a major and continuing impact on the Welsh economy. Dialogue are expanding their global footprint by identifying scaling companies who wish to expand globally and Wales is one market worth exploring.

Michael Killeen, Dialogue Chairman,  presented this year’s fast growth award to Village Bakery of Wrexham. ‘’It was a superb event, reminding us of the early Celtic Tiger years when Irelands pride and confidence were at an all-time high. There are tremendous opportunities for Irish service companies to assist Welsh growing companies to a new levels of super growth beyond the UK borders’’.

Dialogue has expanded  its international reach working with companies in Israel, USA, Russia and India. The Welsh exploration was inspired by an opportune meeting with Dylan Evans Jones. ‘’It was a real knock on the side of the head.  Here we have English speaking business people happy to work with Irish neighbors rather than London or Manchester based agencies.’’ Killeen said.  ‘’There is high energy in Wales at the moment and the UK Government are keen to support this momentum.” Unlike Irish people, the Welsh people are more insular and Killeen mentioned on the night for the need of a collaborative effort to start branding Wales Inc. and linking with their diaspora around the world to open up new markets. He was booed off the stage.

Michael Killeen
Chairman

What approaches can help marketing, branding and communication professionals decide what marketing solutions should play a role in generating better results?

1.  Maintaining a cohesive marketing strategy
While this may seem obvious, maintaining cohesion when the channels you are using to reach customers are dispersed and diffused is a constant challenge. And what was previously a matter of identifying needs and communicating benefits now requires a whole new range of skills and capabilities in order to engage customers.
Read more:  4 principles of Marketing Strategy In The Digital Age

2.  Using social media effectively
One of the ways to increase engagement with a customer is by using email in conjunction with social media. Marketers can then, by capitalizing on the strengths of the different channels, keep their customers engaged and their message fresh.
Read more:  5 Tips to Improve Engagement Across Email, Facebook and Twitter

3.  Influencing customer behaviour in the marketplace
Few companies consider the full customer experience and how each stage of the experience can add value. A customer experience that is efforless and then meets the customer’s expectations can work in the same way as nudge theory. By making the desired action the easy thing to do, we encourage and influence that action.
Read more:  How ‘Great Customer Experiences’ can influence behaviours

4.  Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing efforts
Marketers need to be fluent in using analytics to compare how different aspects of a marketing initiative are performing, and not just in terms of ROI, but also how it has affected brand recognition and perception.
Read more:  Marketing Analytics: What It Is And Why It Matters

5.  What are the new challenges for chief marketing executives?
Marketing currently has an enhanced profile as businesses realise how critical it is to ensure growth. However, this puts more pressure on marketing executives to demonstrate this in practice. This means driving top-line growth and brand strength in an era where customers are empowered by social media.  To do this, marketing executives must reorient company culture to be more customer-centric and ensure that the customer experience is consistent with the brand promise.
Read more:  Preparing the Next Generation of Chief Marketers

Paul Rooney
Web Developer

We all want to impress the boss, but it’s hard to know what they’re always looking for. A good place to start is to understand what they are doing to succeed. This article I saw on www.cmo.com entitled ‘5 Steps to ‘Marketing CEO Success’ gives a great insight into what CMO’s are doing globally to succeed in complex and demanding environments.

1. CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE
Today’s CMOs have had to change their perspectives to succeed; they now have to focus on getting more value from everything they are responsible for. While being a proactive change for some, others have experienced expansions of their roles or found themselves wearing multiple hats, thus forcing a broader business-leader perspective. So having adapted to their increased responsibilities, they are operating much more like CEOs rather than just looking after the marketing function.

2. DELIVER AND COMMUNICATE VALUE

Just as the best CMOs know their customers intimately; succeeding at C-level requires in-depth knowledge of the needs, wants and motivations of their C-suite colleagues. This knowledge helps them build alliances and deliver meaningful value and results for the key people.

3. MANAGE COMPLEXITY

Changing regulations, technologies, social trends, business conditions, consumer behaviour and a shed-load of other economic and business factors make a CMO’s world ever more complex. And unfortunately it is only getting worse! The best CMOs deal with this by putting on the “what would the CEO do” hat and seek to get better and better at dealing with and leading their teams through complexity.

4. KNOW WHEN ‘NEW’ IS GOOD

The latest new thing isn’t always the best option. The best CMOs have learned to fine tune their antenna to separate the good from the bad. Not always easy, these CMOs have developed skills and built the right team around them to evaluate the sea of change in order to identify what “new” to embrace and how to best do so.

5. MAKE INNOVATION THE RULE OF THE LAND

CMOs have to create market demand. To do this they must encourage and nurture a culture of innovation. On average, innovating firms grow four times as fast as non-innovating firms (Roper et al, 2009). It is the CMO’s job to interpret and convert insight into new ideas, products, and services that disrupt the norm and really drive consumer demand.

So, understanding what your boss needs to do to succeed should make your job that bit easier. Helping them accomplish these five steps is sure to put you in a favourable position come review time!

Gary McLoughlin
Managing Director