73 Inbound Marketing Statistics: 2021 Ultimate List for M...

Posted: October 31, 2021 | Last updated: April 4, 2024

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Every brand desires to generate leads and increase sales and revenue. One tested and proven way to achieve these goals is through inbound marketing. What is inbound marketing, and how effective is it in leveraging your marketing campaigns? Discover more through relevant inbound marketing statistics 2021.

Inbound Marketing Statistics 2021

Inbound marketing is the process of attracting potential consumers and helping them discover your brand through different strategies. Some of these marketing strategies include blogs, events, content marketing, social media, search engine optimization (SEO), and email marketing. Now, you may confuse inbound marketing with outbound marketing.

While inbound marketing places your brand in the “spotlight” or visibility, outbound marketing seeks and reaches out to customers through continued advertising. The former focuses on strengthening awareness, generating leads, and fostering strong relationships, while the latter plainly “rents attention.” Simply put, inbound marketing is the modern way of acquiring customers, and outbound marketing is the traditional one.

Want to know more about inbound marketing? Check the data and figures below.

General Inbound Marketing Statistics

Looking at general inbound marketing statistics 2021 allows you to have a clear overview of its practices, strategies, and results. This general information will also prepare you as you dig deeper into the specifics.

75% of marketing professionals consider inbound marketing as an effective and productive strategy.
Meanwhile, 74% of organizations worldwide rely heavily on inbound marketing as their primary marketing approach.
The most common marketing challenges companies face are generating leads (61%), proving good ROI (39%), getting a sufficient budget (27%), and managing the website (25%).
Moreover, 24% struggle with recognizing the right technology for their inbound marketing efforts, and 20% find it hard to create well-targeted content. Check out this ContentCal review if you have the same marketing struggles.
Inbound marketing allows businesses to generate 50% more sales-ready leads at lower costs.
Leads generated from inbound marketing cost 60% less than outbound marketing-generated leads.
On the other hand, brands expect to increase their artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives spending by as high as 50%.
Aside from AI, top company goals include improving organic online presence (61%), blogging (55%), marketing automation (50%), content distribution (47%), interactive content creation (36%), visual content long-form (35%), and visual content creation (30%).
In 2020, 47% of B2B companies in the United States explored personalized marketing, 42% on account-based marketing, 41% on video marketing, 39% on inbound marketing, and 36% on artificial intelligence and automation.
Moreover, 33% invested in conversational marketing, 27% in influencer marketing, 22% in podcasting and live streaming, 19% in programmatic advertising, and 17% in a mobile-first strategy.

Strategies and Advertising Statistics

Knowing the current inbound marketing strategies statistics will help you realize how this modern type of marketing has changed the digital advertising game. Moreover, you’ll see why marketers prefer inbound marketing over outbound marketing.

According to advertising statistics 2020, the advertising realm experienced a 12% surge in marketers shifting from traditional advertising to inbound techniques.
34% of marketers claimed they’ve successfully launched their product or service through inbound marketing, while 31% said they were able to build their brand’s reputation and enhance target attributes.
Among B2B firms, 88% of the most used technology for inbound marketing is analytics tools and software.
However, 24% of marketing professionals claim that the lack of tools integration is a chief obstacle to executing a marketing campaign.
As per marketing statistics 2020, 89% of marketers find influencer marketing’s ROI superior to other marketing channels or strategies.
As revealed by a 2020 online marketing channels survey from Statista, the most effective inbound marketing forms are content marketing at 20%, AI and big data at 14%, social media marketing at 10%, marketing automation at 9%, and mobile marketing at 9%.

Inbound Marketing Success Statistics

The business world is getting more digital, and marketers have jumped into inbound marketing to grow their business. Want to know why? Read the following inbound marketing statistics 2021:

Unlike outbound marketing, money spent on inbound marketing generates thrice as many leads.
Moreover, properly executed inbound marketing techniques are 10x more effective in lead conversion than outbound marketing.
SEO-generated inbound leads have a closing rate of 14.6%.
Meanwhile, only 18% of marketers believe that outbound marketing generates high-quality leads, while a high 60% believe that inbound marketing is a better tool for lead generation and customer acquisition.
Campaigns with several marketing channels generate 90% more customer retention rates, 20% greater engagement rates, and 250% buying frequency rates than campaigns with a single channel only.
On the other hand, over 1,000% ROI may be generated by a properly-designed integrated inbound marketing strategy.
Companies with well-integrated inbound strategies saw a 1,408% increase in blog views, a 168% increase in total leads, and a 51.64% increase in email click rates.

Learn how to check your marketing analytics and performance through this SharedCount review.

Inbound Marketing Channels Statistics

As mentioned above, inbound marketing has several forms or channels under its umbrella. Hence, you should look at the relevant inbound marketing statistics 2021 to determine which form or channel would work best for your brand.

Social Media Marketing Statistics 2021

Social media has over 3.6 billion users from around the globe. This figure has been projected to increase to 4.41 billion in 2025.
As ranked by the number of active users, the top seven social media platforms are Facebook, YouTube, Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and TikTok.
Social media users, including business owners, exchange at least 1 million messages on Messenger monthly.
Moreover, 70% of consumers expect to make future customer service inquiries via social media messaging.
When seeking customer service, 64% of consumers prefer to send a message than make a call.
On the other hand, 21% of consumers prefer to buy from brands they can reach on social media.
During the 2nd quarter of 2020, the average cost per thousand impressions (CPM) on social media reached $4.33.
The number of small businesses that utilize free business tools on Facebook is more than 80 million.
Since 2020, the primary platform for marketers’ content distribution has been Facebook. However, in 2018, the top channels for content distribution are YouTube by 45%, professional networks by 43%, Facebook video by 41%, Instagram by 39%, and other messaging apps by 24%.
18% of marketing professionals utilize Facebook Groups. A sign that Facebook Group marketing is growing.
Among marketers, Instagram has the 2nd highest ROI, while Facebook bagged the top spot.
90% of companies rely on social media to increase their brand awareness.
According to inbound marketing statistics 2021, consumers love to see social media posts with links (30%), graphics and photos (18%), and videos (17%).
More than 80% of marketers use social media as their primary approach to inbound marketing.
Meanwhile, 96% of marketers claim that LinkedIn is the platform that generates the best overall outcomes for distributing B2B organic content.
Following LinkedIn are Twitter and Facebook, with 82% of marketers each.

Content Marketing Statistics 2021

78% of businesses have at least 1 to 3 content specialist teams.
According to inbound marketing statistics 2021, 70% of marketers boosted their investments in content marketing.
One of the two gauges of content marketing success is web traffic.
As claimed by 40% of brands, content marketing is essential to their marketing strategy.
Meanwhile, the percentage of marketers who seek to rank for Google Featured Snippets is 53%.
Over 30% of internet users read blog posts regularly.
Moreover, brands that create blogs have seen 97% more links shared to their sites than those that don’t.
Brands that prioritize blogs generate 13x higher ROI from content marketing.
Meanwhile, blog posts containing over 2,000 words perform stronger than those with lesser word counts.
Blog headlines that generate more views or clicks are those having numbers (36%), addressing readers directly (21%), and containing the phrase ‘how to’ (17%).
Moreover, Forbes revealed that blogs incorporating statistics could rapidly improve customer trust.
According to inbound marketing analysis, 91% of B2B and 86% of B2C marketers use content marketing in their marketing efforts.
However, only 39% document their marketing strategies.
Content marketing is the most effective inbound marketing technique for 20% of marketers from all over the world.
On the other hand, 80% of consumers claim to have purchased an app or software after watching a brand’s video ad.
Nearly 55% of consumers demand more video content from brands they support.
Moreover, 72% of users prefer watching videos to learn about a particular product or service.
Video content creation is now the priority of over 93% of marketers.
After placing videos on their channels or sites, companies have observed a remarkable 78% traffic increase.
According to 41.5% of marketers, the visual marketing format that worked best for their campaigns is infographics.

Other Digital Marketing Statistics 2021

As advertising statistics 2021 show, organic searches are the starting point of 53% of online shopping experiences.
Meanwhile, 20x more opportunities for driving traffic can be offered by SEO on mobile and desktop as opposed to PPC.
Over 70% of customers who utilize search engines visit organic results only.
Meanwhile, the percentage of users who ignore sponsored search results ranges from 70% to 80%.
57% of B2B marketers report that SEO generates more leads than other digital marketing initiatives.
From 2017 to 2018, 65% of marketing professionals said that the most difficult SEO strategy is link building.
As shown by several marketing trends 2021, you could earn at least $42 for every $1 spent on email marketing.
In 2020, small businesses generated the highest ROI through email marketing.
93% of marketing professionals are looking into email marketing for the distribution of content.
For the past three years, email marketing has proven to be best for customer retention at 61%, brand promotion at 54%, brand conversion at 53%, acquisition at 43%, and reactivation at 41%.
Using segmented campaigns may boost your revenue up to 760%.
According to inbound marketing statistics 2021, 45% of customers prefer to receive emails on discount codes, 43% on free samples, 38% on free delivery, 30% on loyalty rewards, and 21% on competition details.
Moreover, 16% want to receive emails on new product releases, 15% on privacy policies, 12% on VIP access, and 10% on product reviews.

Build Effective Inbound Marketing Strategies Now

Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing — Inbound vs outbound marketing—Let this diagram guide you on which marketing efforts are more effective for your brand.

There’s no denying that brands in this digital age can do more with inbound marketing, though outbound marketing strategies and practices aren’t entirely irrelevant. As shown by inbound marketing statistics 2021, strategies and campaigns like SEO, content marketing, or social media advertising can serve consumers better, especially those who research before purchasing a product or service.

However, the things that work today might not be relevant tomorrow. Thus, marketers and brands shouldn’t let their guards down and must learn to adapt to the recent marketing trends and developments. If you want to know more about digital marketing, check out these “Digital Marketing Statistics: 2021 Trends, Market Share and Data.”

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