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 6 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.

In what appears to be an attempt to level the playing field, small business are investing less in outbound marketing, and turning to blogs and social media to decrease the overall cost of lead generation. Blogging and social media is a long-range approach, however, so if you are just starting out in social media, be sure to clarify how fast you expect results.

Sometimes results are immediate, especially if you have a large personal network already that can be leveraged into referrals and an increased network, quickly. But if your company just started, or if you are re-inventing yourself and just starting, it’s probably going take 6-12 months for your corporate social media campaign to kick in with some kind of decent ROI.  Maybe longer.

Are you planning on making the switch this year to a more concerted effort with blogs and social media? Plan on having a robust content creation strategy that utilized long tail keywords within the content. Blogs will allow you to leverage the content the most effectively when it comes to showing up well on Google.

There are loads of tools to help you implement an effective marketing plan using these new modern tools. As long as they are based around content and keywords, you should make progress.

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Interested in learning more about how The Association can help you implement enterprise social media and Inbound Marketing? Visit my resources blog for helpful videos  or fill out a request form here.