A recently released report by Marketing Charts titled “State of Inbound Marketing Report” from HubSpot, reveals a growing trend of brands focusing their energy and funding on “inbound” marketing versus “outbound.”  Outbound techniques have long been employed and still constitute the majority of marketing techniques, but that is beginning to change.  Last year’s numbers indicated brands were beginning to rely more on inbound marketing techniques to generate leads; this year the outbound marketing budge­ts contracted further, closing the gap between the two opposing approaches.

What’s the Difference between Inbound and Outbound?

So what exactly constitutes an inbound approach versus an outbound approach?  And what techniques are brands turning to?  Essentially, an outbound approach is that where a marketer pushes his message out to the masses whereas an inbound approach is designed to pull in people who are already looking for your product or service.  HubSpot classified these techniques based on how important they were perceived by the company, and also allowed for multiple responses in order to account for brands that place value in more than one technique.  From their data, we see that popular and time-tested outbound techniques, such as direct mail and telemarketing, contracted 1% and 6% respectively, only generating 10% of leads each.  Trade shows remained flat at 10% importance among respondents, meaning outbound techniques are preferred by less than 1/3 of brands.

Meanwhile, inbound techniques have become increasingly important to brands.  Paid search and AdWords were the only inbound methods that fell in importance, now at 22%.  However, social media, company blogs, and SEO methods have all increased in importance to brands, with social media and SEO methods important to 60% and 59% of companies, respectively.  Company blogs were claimed to be important to 49% of the survey’s respondents.

Follow the Money, Inbound Marketing Budgets on the Rise

But let’s get down to the bottom-line: company budgets.  When asked whether budgets for inbound marketing strategies increased or decreased for the year 2010, 51% of respondents claimed their budget had increased, with an additional 37% claiming it had remained constant.  This means that 88% of American companies have maintained a healthy budget for inbound techniques, such as social media and SEO marketing strategies.  Furthermore, of the companies that claimed to have a lower budget for inbound marketing campaigns, 92% claimed that the economy, not performance, was the reason for the decrease.

Specifically, social media campaigns returned high confidence numbers from brands, with four in 10 companies overall acquiring customers from major social networks.  Businesses are increasingly placing their confidence in inbound marketing strategies, believing social media and SEO to be the two most important channels in gaining leads and bolstering their brand image.

Two recent independent developments promise to shakeup the way traffic is measured on the Internet.  First Google announced plans to soon allow users to opt-out of being tracked through Google Analytics.  Secondly, the increased deployment of Flash cookies over HTML cookies has given analysts and business people a bit of encouragement, as Flash cookies are more sophisticated and harder to detect than their HTML counterpart, stoking the fears of privacy advocates wary of the amount of information collected on Google and search engine servers.

Anxiety Over the Future of Analytics

Google’s announcement poses some serious questions as to how traffic will be measured on the Internet.  Precipitated by growing concerns over privacy on the web, Google appears to be attempting to set itself in front of the issue and above the fray.  As Google Analytics is already an imperfect system, statistical purists find themselves asking whether data can be trusted once users can prevent their information from being tracked.  Once a significant number of Internet users opt-out, Google Analytics information may be rendered less useful.  Businesses will not doubt turn to other analytic services; however, the question remains whether other analytics tools will follow Google’s lead and offer users the same option.

On the flip side of the debate, analysts look to the promise of Flash cookies.  As mentioned above, Flash cookies are more sophisticated and pose hurdles for a user to detect and delete.  Furthermore, Flash cookies, one of the Internet’s better kept secrets, can re-spawn after deletion.  The additional hurdles users would need to overcome to free themselves from Flash tracking than simply opting out of Google Analytics could ensure that analytic information would retain its accuracy and integrity.

Not So Fast, Flash Cookies

Unfortunately for businesses and analysts, the public isn’t quite as ignorant to Flash cookies as they would like.  A recent article in OnlineMediaDaily claims that 7% of Flash cookies are deleted, which may not seem like a significant proportion; however, this number has doubled in the past 10 months.

It is no surprise that Internet Marketing will continue to grow and start taking additional budget dollars away from traditional marketing. It is surprising by how much the current market is expected to grow in size over the next few years. Check out this chart below. Overall Interactive budgets will soar to above $55 Billion. The Internet Marketing Agencies will continue to take business from traditional agencies as online begins to rule the advertising world.

According to our friends at Blogstorm and Forrester Research, a lot of companies are still not taking advantage of organic SEO. In fact, many companies spend 20 times as much on PPC over SEO even though SEO drives 75% of the traffic.  This will begin to change as more companies realize the benefits of organic SEO.

SEO drives 75%+ of all search traffic, yet garners less than 15% of marketing budgets for SEM campaigns. PPC receives less than 25% of all search traffic, yet earns 80%+ of SEM campaign budgets.

Are you ready for the Google Caffeine update forewarned to be unleashed in early 2010 after the upcoming holidays?

Google first alluded to this next generation infrastructure shift back on August 10th.

This shifts will change how Google does its crawling, indexing, and ranking as it will be on a much faster scale in many respects can be seen as a response to both Bing & Twitter.

Matt Cutts put everyone on notice at PubCon in Las Vegas this November that Caffeine will be released after the holidays and that your site’s load time will be a factor.

Site loading speed is important not just for better search results but as well for mobile browsers which with Android & the iPhone is exponentially increasing in search share, so Google has provided a tool to help your site get faster.

I directly asked Matt while he was fielding questions during the Search Engine Smackdown at PubCon if the SERPs or Search Engine Result Pages will be rendered in AJAX with the Caffeine update to which he said no, but they are still experimenting with it.

Matt Cutts & Michael Martin playing pool at The Garage in Seattle

Just as I learned to not beat Matt Cutts when playing pool if you want to keep your rankings, you should also test your site out before a big Google algorithm shift such as this.

You can test your results on the one Google datacenter containing Caffeine that pushes those results about half the time at 209.85.225.103

I was recently speaking at the 2009 PubCon in Las Vegas on both an Organic Site Review Clinic & an SEO Site Design Panel.

The Organic Site Clinic on Wednesday November 11th was only myself & Alan K’necht of K’nechtology where we were aligned on foundational & canonical SEO for the sites we reviewed as we are both sticklers for proper back-end coding.

We even came across a site that was using a MORE link to hide content at the bottom of each of their pages – the site will remain unnamed

Later that Wednesday after lunch I was on an SEO Design & Organic Site Structure panel with Ted Ulle of Converseon, Lyndsay Walker of Canada’s Web Shop, Scott Polk of Search & Social Media.

Moderating this motley crew was Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance with QA moderator Taylor Pratt of nFusion.

We all agreed we would keep our presentations to under 5 minutes so people could ask plenty of questions and get some great takeaways rather than just simply hearing us talk on and on, on stage.

I spoke on foundational SEO concentrating on what I term the big 3 of the .htaccess, robots.txt, & Webmaster Tools – I included my presentation below:

Ted went over some great foundational design information while Lyndsay went into coding advice and Scott provided some great tips, but where I disagreed with Scott is on using file extensions over directories.

I like & respect Scott Polk as he is great speaker with a wealth of knowledge & experience coming from Bruce Clay thus I didn’t want to undermine him publicly so I simply nodded in agreement with Ted on stage with him stating he prefers directories.

All things being equal a page at abc.com/xyz.html has just a good chance to rank as abc.com/xyz/ but with the directory page you have the added benefit of not having to change reference links if you go to another web page format such as php, asp, cfm, etc plus I feel its better organizationally since you can place related pages & files in this directory giving them added keyword weight.

Scott stuck to his guns on extensions over directories while also being correct that you can simply resolve the new web page format issue in the .htaccess, but I still contend directories are better long term both organizationally &  for SEO.

What do you think?

Internet Marketing Inc will be represented at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago on December 9th, 2009.

Search Engine Strategies or SES for short, is a leading global conference and training series focused on search engine optimization and search engine marketing put on by Incisive Media which includes ClickZ & Search Engine Watch.

I will be hosting a site clinic at SES Chicago from 4pm to 5:15pm on December 9th, 2009 at the Chicago Hilton.

In this session I will provide feedback to improve the sites provided from the audience mostly from an SEO point of view.

I will speaking as well at the upcoming PubCon in Las Vegas on several sessions including a Site Clinic at 10am on Wednesday November 11th and then at 1:30 I will present on SEO Design & Organic Site Structure at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

If you are going to PubCon in November or SES Chicago in December please let me know so we can make time to meet each other.

,Michael Martin

A week after speaking at SMX East in New York City these are my reflections on the conference:

• There were a lot of the same faces from other Internet Marketing conferences such as PubCon & SMX Advanced.

• I thought there would be more corporations and neophytes to Internet Marketing at the conference than there were.

• Weather was extremely warm the first couple days in New York City as it was similar to that in San Diego.

• Less than half the attendees were at the last day of sessions on Wednesday which I felt were the best to attend.

• The best part of conferences is not necessarily the sessions themselves but the networking after and talks during such as the extensive conversations I had with Stephan Spencer of NetConcepts.

I was also appreciative of all the live bloggers covering my session on Google Android Monday October 9th such as Bruce Clay, Outspoken Media, 10e20, &  SEO Roundtable, as well WebProNews for the interview below:

Internet Marketing Inc. is gearing up for the Search Marketing Expo in New York next week!  Our very own SEO Director Michael Martin will be speaking on the panel covering “Mobile Search Apps and Opportunities”.  Michael will be on a panel with Scott Dunlap, Rachel Pasqua, and Matt Siltala.  This session will look at popular search apps and different devices, how they gather data, and the Internet marketing opportunities they offer. 

The team from the New York office will also be in attendance all week.  We are looking forward to learning new things and meeting new people.

Blogging is not social media in itself, but it is a perfect avenue for providing great value to your audience and social media strategy. When I speak about Internet marketing and social media to CEO’s and business owners, one of the biggest hurdles is blogging. Why? Because it takes time, understanding, and a general committment to provide a consistent knowledge transfer to for your readers.

Business owners simply need to embrace the importance of blogging as a tool for communicating your knowledge and experiences in your particular field. To do so, they must understand what its all about, why it is indeed important, and in what capacity. Once they have a clear vision, it is easier to make the committment.

HERE ARE SOME TIPS FOR GETTING STARTED:

Be An Expert in Your Field >>We can use the term “expert” losely but it does help if you know what you are talking about.  If you are a business owner, chances are you have a lot of knowledge and experience you can share with your readers. 

Start Be Reading Other Blogs >> Blogging is different than traditional writing and usually takes on a more casual tone.  The best way to gain a clear understanding of how bloggers in your industry do it is of course to read their blogs.  Simply run some Google searches or use Technorati (great tool for searching the blogoshpere) to find top blogs related to your business industry.

Messaging >>  After reading other top blogs you should have a good understanding of how people write.  You may also notice that good blogs are vary rarely self serving.  As a businss owner, the most value you will bring to the table (and therefore gain positive feedback) is through thoughtful educational topics such “How to..” guides or “10 Great Ways to…”.  Blog readers want it simple, well written, casual, and valuable.  They want to be able to lear something quickly and easily.

Be Consistent >>  The worst thing we can do as business owners is to start something and then not follow through.  That is why you must make the time committment.  Will you always be able to stick to your “blogging schedule”?  Of course not.  But that is why you have to make other sacrifices.  Why do you think I am multitasking on a Sunday (watching football while blogging)??  Contributing to your blog three to five times each week is good enough.  Don’t stress out about it.  Once you get into the groove it can be an enjoyable activity.

UNDERSTANDING THE MARKETING VALUE:

We already touched on the fact that good blogging allows you to show what you know.  The more free knowledge you provide your audience, the greater value it will bring your business.  Blogging also brings a certain amount of trust to a company.  That is why I always recommend that companies (large and small) have a corporate blog.  It is also great if the owners and/or top executives are the key contributors.  This goes back to the “transparency” part of social media.  Consumers want to see the CEO’s and owners out in front leading by example and taking responsibility for their brand.  But there is a more technical marketing value behind blogging and that is search engine optimization. 

Blogging is one of the best ways to add great content to your site as often as you like.  Great content of course leads to more pages for your website that can potentially get indexed and ranked by the search engines. 

Here are some tips:

1. The best way to accomplish this is to use a SEO friendly blog platform such as WordPress (this blog is a WordPress platform) and integrate it with your website (i.e. www.yourdomainname.com/blog). 
2. Have your keyword strategy in mind when writing.  Use blog titles and phrases relevant to your topic and industry.  For example, if you run a financial consulting firm you might write a blog about “How to Maintain Financial Liquidity”.  In that blog you would want to include keywords related to your topic as it relates to your keyword strategy.  I don’t want to get too far into SEO because that is a whole other topic.  As long as you write well and at least keep these tips in mind, it will add value to your website.
3. Promote your blog on your website in the header or footer so people know you have one.  I also recommend having a link to your blog in your email signature.  If you are engaged in social media, provide links to your blog through Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.  After each blog you write, post it on Facebook with a note about the topic.  The more you write and promote the blog, the more successful you will be in increasing links and website traffic.