State of Inbound Report 2018

The state of Inbound 2018 report is finally here! Read on for some great stats and insights of the current state of the marketing landscape.

The Main Marketing Challenges and Priorities for Marketers

Top priorities:

• 69% of marketers said that their biggest priority was converting leads to customers
• 61% said that their marketing priority was to grow SEO and organic presence. Blog content creation followed second with 55% saying that is their priority. Surprisingly only 50% of people said that marketing automation was their priority, but I would expect this is because most companies already have this in place.

Top challenges:

• 61% said their biggest challenge was generating traffic and leads
• 39% said ‘proving the ROI of our marketing activities’. This is a big challenge as 53% of marketers said that ‘Inbound marketing gives us higher ROI’. While 18% of people could not or do not bother calculating ROI.

The Growing Importance of Video Marketing

In the 2017 report we saw a big shift with marketers focusing more on video marketing. The 2018 report shows that YouTube is the channel most invested in with 45% of marketers saying that this is one of the channels they will be investing in over the next 12 months.

But who started the video hype? Well, you may have thought this is a trend of the younger generation, but the State of inbound 2018 shows that it’s actually the senior marketing leaders who are making a stand and putting video at the forefront.

Business Preferences

Are you becoming a little anti-social? I think so… 83% of people within a business for internal communication prefer to communicate over email; with only 59% of people who would rather speak face-to-face. Looking at the other end of the scale only 32% of people want to communicate using messenger apps such as WhatsApp, WeChat, and Facebook messenger. It appears to be the C-Level executive’s that prefer using the messenger apps than VP’s, Managers and Individual contributors.

Overrated Marketing Techniques

HubSpot asked marketers what they think the most overrated form of marketing tactics, and by far, paid advertising was voted the most overrated. Maybe the death of paid advertising is near, there’s a few reasons this could be such as banner ads becoming too popular, or people aren’t seeing enough return on investment from them, we’ll have to wait and find out.

Sales

Surprisingly, 75% of sales teams have said that instead of improving the efficiency of the sales funnel that they are more focused on closing more deals in the year to come.

Now a sales team should be spending all their time on prospecting and selling, right? In fact, many reps are spending a lot of time on data entry. The report showed us that only 25% spend less than 30 mins on data entry per day, everyone else is spending between 30-120 minutes per day on data entry and other manual tasks.

On top of this, the majority of senior leaders are predicting that their sales teams are spending less than 30 minutes a day on data entry and manual tasks.

To download and read the report in full, please click here.