#1 – Inbound marketing channels deliver a dramatically lower cost-per-sales lead than outbound channels.

Respondents that spent more than 50% of their marketing budget on inbound marketing consistently reported a lower cost-per-sales lead than those that spent 50% or more on outbound marketing. In fact, inbound marketing-dominated organizations experience a 61% lower cost-per-lead than outbound marketing-dominated organizations.

Businesses are responding by allocating a greater portion of their budget to inbound marketing. Currently, 37% of business’ lead-generation budget is dedicated to inbound marketing, whereas 30% is dedicated to outbound marketing efforts. We expect this gap to widen significantly over time.

#2 – Blogs lead other social media categories in terms of importance to business.

Blogs are frequently cited as the most useful type of social media marketing, with 75% of those familiar with their business’ blogging efforts saying they are ‘useful,’ ‘important,’ or ‘critical’ to their business. MySpace finished last in terms of importance MySpace finished last in terms of importance of those that use the service for business purposes.

#3 – Small businesses are most aggressively allocating lead generation budgets to blogging, social media and search engine optimization.

Realizing that inbound marketing techniques ‘level the playing field’ with the bigger budgets of larger competitors, small businesses are spending a 180% greater portion of their budgets on blogging/social media and 36% greater portion of their budgets on search engine optimization than businesses with 50 employees or more.

That ladies and gentleman is excitement; stats can be boring, profits are certainly not. There are 3 areas that I contend used together can be very powerful and therefor need to be are very significant part of any businesses budget; big or small business. PPC, SEO, and a well crafted Social Media Marketing (SMM) campaign. There are many ways to spend that hard earned budget; Telemarketing. Email marketing, tradeshows, direct mail just to name the most obvious, I contend that given the information above the 50% or more needs to be spent on SEO, PPC and SMM. Let me further support this with:

… Individual businesses that focus more on inbound expenditures reported a dramatically lower cost-per-lead than their outbound counterparts. Of respondents that self-reported their cost/lead, those that spend 50% or more of their lead generation budget on inbound marketing averaged $84, whereas businesses spending 50% or more on outbound marketing averaged $220 cost/lead.

— Hubspot.com

This is significant enough to get any business owners attention, it certainly got mine. Let’s get to the meat and potatoes of what you do next.

PAY PER CLICK (PPC)

PPC, all your efforts should begin here. PPC can bring you the closest to immediate gratification and what I mean by that is have the correct expectations going in. Although PPC can give you immediate and measurable results the result isn’t always what you wanted. A well planned PPC campaign includes what Tony Robbins calls CANI (Constant and Never-ending Improvement). This alone I think you’ll agree is one of the beauties of the Internet, plan, do and review on a way faster plane than in the entire history of advertising.

Start out by building your campaign around on keyword or one keyword phrase and exploring the long tail keyword phrases and modifiers that are getting and search volume and again, plan, do and review.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)

Right from day one each and every page on you site needs to be optimized. Please appreciate I know that this isn’t a one day project but an ongoing process. The SEO process is much like the PPC process in as much as it’s a CANI approach. When done well and the results start to flow the natural traffic gained here can be the big payoff. One word of caution, “Do not try this at home”. Somewhat tongue in cheek I say this, however, do seek out a professional: either in-house or hire a project manager.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING (SMM)

SMM includes either putting up a company blog or reinventing the one you have now. At a minimum a blog can and needs to be optimized on its own and this is not done the same way a website is done.

Here is where all the insanity is, the Social Media sector is all over the place and the average person even with an above average intellect is left with, “how do I manage all this”. This approach at times may feel like you are racking the forest with bullets to bag some big prey. Why, because that is pretty much what you are doing. As I speak there was over 20 help wanted ads nationwide looking for Social Media Mangers in-house on craigslist, BTW I stopped after looking at about 6 different cities.

It is self evident that SEO/PPC/SMM only can be a full time job, one that can payoff big if you manage a “net conversation” around your brand, product or service correctly. There are at least 40 SM sites that I could chock you with right here, however let me drop you a few worthy of a look/see; Facebook.com, twitter.com, myspace.com, ning.com, linkedin.com, I’m already out of breath. You get my point.

CONCLUSION

I’ll leave you with the good news and the bad news. The bad news first, SEP, PPC and SMM can be a monumental effort. The good news is, look at what sort of effort you may have put into that last trade show, direct mail campaign or other advertising initiatives and look at the result. The numbers never lie, bringing down you’re average cost per lead is always something your organization can rally behind. Lastly, I don’t recommend you abandon all you do and go head first into Cyberspace, I do as the title suggests, susgget you do a Budget Ratio Adjustment (BRA) with an emphasis on the obvious.

Social Media Integration