As an agency who work closely with HubSpot, we waited patiently for their annual State of Inbound Report for 2017. Each year HubSpot tracks shifts in buying behaviour, marketing challenges and sales strategies, to learn how Inbound Marketing has developed over the past year, and what predictions there is for the future.
70% of marketers surveyed revealed their top marketing priority to be converting leads into customers. This is an unsurprising result, with only a slight decline of 4% compared to last year’s report, suggesting this is still the biggest challenge marketers face when it comes to Inbound marketing.
Last year, we were interested to see that marketer’s biggest priorities for their inbound marketing projects were SEO and blogging. The latest report reinforces this, with 61% of respondents prioritising SEO and 53% prioritising blog creation.
The report highlights the ongoing transformations in inbound marketing, revealing paid advertising to be the highest over rated marketing tactic, and reinforces the co-dependent relationship between marketing and sales, with 44% providing a positive reaction in regards to whether sales and marketing is aligned.
The 2017 report shows that closing more deals has risen in priority for marketers since last year, and 44% of respondents believe improving the efficiency of the sales and marketing funnel is a main priority. Globally a massive 71% primarily conduct inbound marketing, presenting how importance inbound marketing has become for marketers across the globe.
Here at Napier, we were pleased to discover that HubSpot’s findings were closely affiliated with Napier’s focus on increasing the speed of the sales tunnel, to help leads turn into customers faster, and our belief in the importance of increasing SEO.
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