Hubspot, a leader in Inbound Marketing, recently surveyed 644 companies to ascertain the state of both Traditional Media (print ads, telemarketing, tradeshows, etc.) & Inbound Marketing. As Hubspot defines it: “Inbound Marketing is a set of marketing strategies and techniques focused on pulling relevant prospects and customers towards a business and it’s products.”

This is part 4 of a 13 part series of blog posts that share bite-size portions of Hubspot’s overall report, “The 2011 State of Inbound Marketing.” If you’d like a full copy of the report, feel free to contact me by clicking here or search for the report by name on Google.

For the purposes of Hubspot’s survey, 9 channels of marketing were defined and each company participating in the survey defined how much of their lead generation budget would be spent on each one. The channels were defined as follows:

Inbound  Channels        Outbound Channels        Not Classified

PPC                               Direct Mail                        Email Marketing

SEO                               Telemarketing                   Other

Social Media                   Trade Shows

Blogs

Since email can be used both as Inbound and Outbound, it wasn’t classified as either. Inbound Marketing is clearly the winner here, but I predict that outbound won’t completely go away. One other outbound channel that is not listed at all is direct response TV ads. Since The Association is a film and video production company, we are trying not to take offense!

More and more the lines between advertising and inbound marketing are melting together. A web page often has advertising on it as well as Facebook share buttons options to comment, etc. Facebook provides ads that target people based on their likes, dislikes and even provides a way to “customize” your ad experience.  Who knows? In a few years, advances in long tail keyword research may result in an advertising experience so slick, we don’t regret having a constant stream of advertising.
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