The internet has become a place of education and entertainment, bringing together people of all walks of life with similar and dissimilar interests. Consumers value the web because it gives them direct access to brands and their products or services. Brafton recently covered a study from the Digital Advertising Alliance that found 92 percent of surveyed Americans agree that web content is somewhat or extremely important to the value of the ‘net.
Consumers’ passion for the web comes at a time when internet marketing is on the rise. Practices like content creation and social media marketing help organizations create online communities that manage customer relations more effectively than offline ventures. It’s no longer a choice – brands must have online campaigns to acquire and retain customers if they want to remain in business.
HubSpot released its “2013 State of Inbound Marketing” report, bringing to light some of the more recent evolutions in web marketing today. According to the source’s original research, inbound marketing is on the rise, with 58 percent of surveyed companies planning to leverage new-media strategies in 2013. Forty-eight percent say they will even increase marketing spend on such practices over the next 12 months.
More, 50 percent of brands say their companies are customer-focused, meaning they spend time and resource improving user experience and engaging with new and existing customers via social media. This is part of a marketing trend toward content that’s not only “high quality,” but responsive, useful and good-looking to capture customers’ interests.
34 percent don’t measure content ROI.
There’s always room for improvements, though. HubSpot’s data shows that 81 percent of brands using inbound marketing to drive conversions tie their approaches to their business strategies, but 34 percent don’t measure content ROI. The lack of analytic understanding is alarming, especially because 43 percent of businesses have generated at least one customer via their blog content already this year.
Inbound marketing helps brands build strategies that pull internet users toward websites, but companies can’t achieve their objectives without high-quality custom content. If companies are investing in inbound tactics, content marketing services can help clients connect the dots by measuring successes, losses and associated conversions with their appropriate channels. Brands wanting to leverage inbound strategies better have a friend in content creation, too.
