Inbound Marketing Statistics You Need To Know

Inbound marketing is the methodology of promoting your business through blogs, podcasts, video, eBooks, newsletters, whitepapers, SEO, social media marketing, and other forms of content marketing which serve to attract visitors to your website, engage and convert those visitors into leads, nurture leads to convert them to customers, and delight your customers to become promoters for your business.
In contrast, buying attention, cold-calling, direct paper mail, radio, TV advertisements, sales flyers, spam, telemarketing and traditional advertising are considered "outbound marketing". The idea of inbound marketing is that people value personalized, relevant and targeted, content – not interruptive messages.
Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it well, the Samurai. Jonathan Rosenberg (former Google Inc. Senior Vice President)

There are lots of statistics to prove the effectiveness of inbound marketing. Here are a few of my favorites stats to get you inspired, and will help you in setting your digital marketing strategy:

1) B2B buyers are 57%-70% through their buying research before first contacting the seller. (Corporate Executive Board) 

2) 94% of the links search users click on are organic, not paid. (eConsultancy) 

3) 68% of all organic clicks go to the top three search results. (eConsultancy) 

4) 75% of search engine users never scroll past the first page of search results. (MarketShareHitsLink.com) 

5) Websites with 51 to 100 pages generate 48% more traffic than websites with 1 to 50 pages. (HubSpot) 

6) B2B companies that blog only 1-2x/month generate 70% more leads than those who don’t blog. (HubSpot) 

7) Companies that increase blogging from 3-5x/month to 6-8x/month almost double their leads. (HubSpot) 

8) An average company will see a 45% growth in traffic when increasing total blog articles from 11-20 to 21-50. (HubSpot) 

9) Companies with 51-100 Twitter followers generate 106% more traffic than those with 25 or fewer. (HubSpot) 
10) 87% of B2B marketers use social media in some form. (Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs) 

11) Social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing. (HubSpot) 

12) Companies see a 55% increase in leads from increasing landing pages from 10 to 15. (HubSpot) 

13) Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads. (The Annuitas Group) 

14) Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost. (Forrester Research) 

15) Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. (The Annuitas Group) 

16) Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. (DemandGen Report) 

17) 95% of qualified prospects on your website are there to research and are not yet ready to talk with a sales rep, but as many as 70% will eventually buy from you or one of your competitors. (Brian Carroll) 

18) 50% of leads are qualified but not yet ready to buy. (Gleanster Research) 

19) The average email list deteriorates 25% per year. (HubSpot) 

20) 65% prefer emails that contain mostly images vs. 35% who prefer mostly text. (HubSpot) 

21) SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads (such as direct mail or print advertising) have a 1.7% close rate. (Search Engine Journal) 

22) 50% of all mobile searches are conducted in hopes of finding local results, and 61% of those searches result in a purchase. (Search Engine Watch)

23) On average, we conduct 12 billion searches per month on the web in the United States. (Comscore, July 2014)

24) 84% of inbound marketers - compared to only 9% of outbound marketers - cite organic sources (blogging, SEO, social media) as rising in importance. (HubSpot State of Inbound, 2014)

25) Marketers who have prioritized blogging are 13x more likely to enjoy positive ROI. (HubSpot State of Inbound, 2014)  

26) B2B companies place a higher value on educational formats like blogging and webinars, whereas consumer businesses are slightly more willing to experiment with advanced digital formats like interactive content and online tools. Infographics were also preferred.

27) Links placed just before the halfway point (in characters) of tweets tended to have higher clickthrough rates than links placed elsewhere. (HubSpot) 

28) 48% of marketers build a new landing page for each marketing campaign. (MarketingSherpa) 

29) 71% of B2B marketers use content marketing to generate leads. (MarketingProfs) 

30) 84% of companies that have a CRM have a lead scoring process in place to determine the quality of leads. (Direct Marketing News) 

I’d love to hear your thoughts about these statistics, and know what inbound marketing statistics would you add to this list? Just fire your thoughts into the comments section below.