Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Inbound marketing focuses on creating content that appeals to your company’s target customers, thus pulling your potential customers to you.Relevant content ranges from answers to questions or challenges customers has through the range of the entire sales funnel.

The content can be form of blog posts, white papers, infographics, videos and more, which are then distributed through channels such as the company blog, newsletter or social media accounts.

With inbound leads costing 61% less to generate than outbound leads, inbound marketing is especially suitable for startups, small and medium businesses with tighter budgets.

If you’re looking to get started with inbound marketing, here are 8 free tools to get your started. We use many of these tools ourselves and with our own clients, so we know first-hand that they’re effective despite being free....

Every year since 2009, HubSpot has released its State of Inbound Marketing report with survey results from thousands of sales and marketing executives.

Every year since 2009, HubSpot has released its State of Inbound Marketing report with survey results from thousands of sales and marketing executives. This year, the report spans the globe, with more than 3500 respondents and topics ranging from planning and budgeting for inbound marketing to execution and analysis. Challenges and priorities for this group have changed significantly over the past five years, but one thing remains constant: Those who practice inbound are still passionate about growing their businesses through the inbound methodology.

Where are we now? We’re moving in some new directions to leverage data and merge disciplines. Let’s take a look at some of these trends....

Here are a hundred and one (yes, 101!) of the top blogs and websites that you should be reading, if you aren’t already. They cover a variety of topics and they are purposely not segregated by topic. Just because you don’t think you may need to read a blog about social media or content doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be looking at it. So get to it....

The best marketers I know are curious.

They're curious about the latest social media update. They're curious about finding solutions to the biggest problems their customers face. And they're curious about how they're performing -- especially in comparison to their peers.

If you consider yourself a curious marketer, we've got a treat for you. Below is a highlight of the main charts and stats from the 2014 State of Inbound Marketing, HubSpot's most recent survey of 3,500 marketing and sales professionals across all company sizes and job titles. If you haven't downloaded the report yet, you should -- it'll give you a whole lot more analysis and insight into the minds of other marketers. ...

One of the best features of Twitter that is relatively unknown to most users is their Lead Generation cards. Your tweet, see live example, will have a button and when another Twitter user clicks the button, their email address is sent to your application (which happens to be a Google spreadsheet in this case).

Whether you are a small website owner or an event organizer, you can use these Lead Generation cards to easily collect email addresses from Twitter users who may be interested in your product. For instance, Twitter users can subscribe to your email newsletter with a click without leaving the Twitter website. Event organizers can use Twitter’s Lead Generation Cards to capture email addresses of people who may be interested in attending an upcoming event....

Now that we have increased the volume of visitors to the site it is time to start converting them. The majority of these conversions will fall into the top and middle of the sales funnel. We convert them with these 4 components....