For the past five years, HubSpot has performed an annual review of inbound marketing trends and tactics to help gauge where the industry is headed and highlight areas of opportunity. Inbound marketing can be best defined as a holistic approach to marketing that utilizes strategies and techniques to help drive a specified target audience to a particular business. 

The 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report prepared by HubSpot includes information compiled from over 3300 marketers from 128 different countries. While you can download the 164-page report and read it in its entirety, we wanted to provide you with a summarized version of the current state of inbound marketing. And, since your inbound marketing agency should be a straight shooter and a trusted partner, we're going to tell you the good, the bad, and the downright ugly:

So, let's start with the good....

• 58 percent of the businesses surveyed practice some type of inbound marketing (i.e.: Search Engine Optimization, social media, and blogging).
• 54 percent of businesses agree that they generate more leads from inbound marketing tactics versus traditional outbound marketing (i.e.: direct mail, TV commercials, and cold calling).
• 48 percent of businesses have plans to increase spending for inbound marketing in 2013, which makes this the third consecutive year where businesses have increased their inbound marketing budgets.
• Inbound marketing tactics are 100 percent more effective with website conversions than outbound marketing efforts.

Now for the bad....

In our recent Website Audit Part 1 post we discussed why your business website is so important today and the why you should do an annual website audit.

A common question we get from small and medium sized business owners and their marketing teams when they are evaluating the merits of adopting inbound/online marketing program is - what’s my ROI?

This is a very legitimate question, particularly for businesses owners who have only ever used traditional marketing approaches in the past such as direct mail, print advertising in trade journals or the local newspaper, trade shows, radio and telemarketing to name a few.

Before answering this question however, it’s necessary to step back for a moment and review the benchmark that business owners and their teams will be comparing their new inbound