Marketing Automation
Inbound Marketing
Demand Generation

The tech industry is known for inventing new names for existing things, mainly to promote their own company. Great for them, but bad for customers: there’s always so much confusion about these new terms (earlier I wrote about the confusion around Demand Generation and Sales 2.0).

The newest term on the block is “Inbound Marketing”. I’ve already written several posts about Inbound Marketing, but I wondered if the average B2B marketing manager has any idea what it means. So I created a non-scientific poll on LinkedIn asking:

“Do you use Inbound Marketing for B2B Lead Generation?”

LinkedIn showed this poll to randomly selected marketing professionals who work in the Tech Industry.

Overall Results

The overall results were pretty good: almost half of the respondents is already actively using Inbound Marketing. Although 25% has no idea what it is.

Are You Old Enough for Inbound Marketing?

If you then zoom in on the demographics, the ‘age’ graph gives some interesting results:

The older the respondent, the more likely they are to know about and use Inbound Marketing. I though Inbound Marketing and Social Media would be a Generation Y thing!

Seasoned Marketers Know the Trends

If you then zoom in on the job level of respondents, we find a likely explanation. “Older” usually means markers in senior positions. And senior marketing executives have a helicopter view: they may not know the details, but they are good at spotting new trends and taking advantage of them.

Is “Inbound Marketing” Approved?

I’d say “yes”. It clear that many B2B marketers know what it means, and many are already actively using it. Of course, the survey biased. LinkedIn users are more likely to know about Inbound Marketing than the average marketer, because LinkedIn is one of the Inbound Marketing tools. And people who don’t know what Inbound Marketing is could have simply skipped the poll.

For me personally: this blog is mainly read by innovators, so I should be safe to use Inbound Marketing as a well-known term. What is your take?

Use this link for the full results: Inbound Marketing Survey results

Earlier this year Jame-Ane Ervin wrote a great post about the results of promoting her webinar via Social Media. She got a 400% increase in leads! Now that’s effective use of social media.

A couple of weeks ago I met one of the founders of the site Social Media B2B: Jeff Cohen (@dgtlpapercuts). We started talking and he asked me to write a post about using Social Media for B2B Lead Generation, as LeadSloth has done a fair bit of work in that area.

I decided to limit myself to Blogging, LinkedIn and Twitter. I could only use 1,000 words, and in my opinion Blogging, LinkedIn and Twitter are the powerhouses of social media for B2B lead generation. Just some excerpts from the post:

• “Always include a clear call to action at the bottom of older blog posts (…) this call to action does magic for lead generation”
• “Twitter is getting more popular every day. That’s both a blessing and a curse. It’s great that the audience is growing, but the average Twitter user has a hard time actually reading all those tweets.”
• “The benefit of LinkedIn is that it is a business-focused social network, so it’s usually a source of very qualified leads.”

You can read the post here: Increase B2B Lead Generation with Social Media

Let me know what you think!