COMMENTS
I see "campaigns" on the fist word cloud. Do we know what kinds of campaigns were being reported?
I'm surprised that so many people find PPC to be one of the more regrettable marketing practices. Maybe they weren't satisfied with it because they were doing it wrong? Thoughts?
I see a silver lining in that second dark cloud.
While I am a total fan of Inbound Marketing, both Email and Direct Mail are still highly effective - when used properly. So is seems there seems there is a big fat educational opportunity lurking within that dark cloud!
Oops. What's missing is how you collected these respondents. From what pool? Were they your customers, or blog readers? Were they primarily drawn from a particular industry or geographic location? Or was it a truly random sample? This would be good info to know.
Because any of those limitations would have skewed your results, and 167 responses is not a lot to work with to draw conclusions like this. This is an interesting report, and you clearly put a lot of effort into it. However, I was surprised at the findings about email and direct mail, because it contradicts the findings of other, more extensive studies I have read.
I agree that inbound marketing is important but I don't think these findings allow for us to generalize about its actually usage, especially among small businesses.
I'm not saying your findings are wrong, or right, but I would have more confidence in them if the report included a more detailed description about how you selected your sample.
Ken - the word cloud is an interesting way to represent how often a word was said, but there are times when a word is repeated in different contexts, so its meaning varies. "Campaigns" is a good example of that so it's hard to interpret what it means. I would focus on the other words in each cloud.
Bags -- PPC is interesting because it is listed in both the "best" and "worst" practices. I think this speaks to some businesses making the right investments in PPC and others not doing as good of a job.
Mary -- thanks for your input. I agree that a larger sample size would have been ideal and we will work on increasing that for next year's report. In terms of the "randomness" of the sample, the survey was sent to two primary audiences: those on the ProMarketers Group on LinkedIn (20K marketers) and users of
Website Grader (more than 600K reports run). Although not a random sample of all businesses in the US, we think this is a solid representation of inbound marketing trends.
Putting aside the statistical validity and sample size issues, the tag cloud is certainly cool.
Mike - neat idea. I'm not surprised to see email or direct mail in the second cloud. Both represent one-way conversations from marketers, which in my opinion will be nonexistent due to the growing use of social media by both brands and their consumers.I read one comment about email being effective if you use it properly. I'd agree with this if it's in reference to using email as a viral tool, or if the audience specifically asked you to send certain information. But, the traditional method of pushing a message into an already-clouded in-box seems very inefficient by today's standards.
Well, Mike, we're not talking ideal sample size...we're talking acceptable sample size, and acceptable randomness.
Your results are fatally biased. Try this again with a proper random sample. Your sample consists of people who are already familiar with HubSpot, and would be likely to use inbound marketing services, and therefore are predisposed to give you the results you had hoped for. They're most likely early adopters. Not a representative sample of American business by a long shot. I knew something was fishy...not that you didn't have the best of intentions. An honest mistake, but one you need to fix if you want your results to be taken seriously.
The second problem is that 167 responses out of -- did you say 620,000 targeted? -- is an unacceptable response rate for survey validity purposes. What you appear to have is a non-response bias. Among other problems. So, although it does not disprove your claims, unfortunately, it does not prove them, either. Not even close. You need at least a 30% response rate (some say quite a bit higher) if it is an online survey.
Use a Harris poll or get a university to do it pro bono or low cost, and get a proper random sample.
Only your best friends will tell you when your slip is showing, or you have spinach in your teeth. Please take my comments in that light :)
Give it another shot! :)
You folks are really "getting it" and communicating that insight effectively. Bravo!
Mary Fletcher Jones -
This research is not being submitted to an academic peer-reviewed journal, and like all "popular" research is not statistically perfect. Did you know that Technorati's "State of the Blogosphere" report (who monitors tens of millions of blogs) only included responses from a few hundred bloggers? That "research" gets quoted lots of places, including top blogs and print newspapers. But, I agree with you that this data would not live up to true academic scrutiny (my wife has a PhD and is a published professor, so I know where you are coming from).
However, I disagree with your assumption that the data is useless because of that. As long as you understand the source and potential pitfalls of the data, you can interpret it and gain useful insights.
Certainly this survey was of people more interested in inbound marketing than the general population, for a couple reasons. But, knowing that, I think you can say that people familiar with inbound marketing find it to be more effective than outbound marketing. If you read the article form Friday, the cost per lead is 3 times lower from inbound marketing. I think this data should make people who focus exclusively on outbound markeitng to think about researching and incorporating some inbound marketing into their marketing mix and testing what the results are like for them.
Plus the word clouds just look so damn cool... :)
Very interesting article. I believe that "blogs," "SEO," "websites," "campaigns" and "social media" are extremely important. Another thing that business owners’ MUST take into consideration is accessibility. You have to be accessible to your customer? One thing that has helped me in addition to SEO and marketing campaigns is phone conference calling, web and video conferencing. This has kept me in touch with my clients as well as my employees. I can give clients presentations and even staff training. You can find info about phone conferencing and web conferencing on sites like http://www.24conference.com, just to give you a general idea.
I am actually surprised that PPC takes only 15%. Was always under impression that it was the biggest and the fastest growing part of internet marketing.
Anyways, thanks for the info you have put in here. It's quite an eyeopener.
Random question, but what did you use to generate those word clouds?
Hi,
I really love the best marketing practice diagram. Do you have that in a higher resolution? I would like to use that as a wallpaper. You guys should sell it as a poster too.
love it!