Are You Old Enough for Inbound Marketing?

The tech industry is known for inventing new names for existing things, mainly to promote their own company. Great for them, but bad for customers: there’s always so much confusion about these new terms (earlier I wrote about the confusion around Demand Generation and Sales 2.0).

The newest term on the block is “Inbound Marketing”. I’ve already written several posts about Inbound Marketing, but I wondered if the average B2B marketing manager has any idea what it means. So I created a non-scientific poll on LinkedIn asking:

“Do you use Inbound Marketing for B2B Lead Generation?”

Are you using inbound marketing for b2b lead generation

LinkedIn showed this poll to randomly selected marketing professionals who work in the Tech Industry.

Overall Results

The overall results were pretty good: almost half of the respondents is already actively using Inbound Marketing. Although 25% has no idea what it is.

overall results of inbound marketing survey

Are You Old Enough for Inbound Marketing?

If you then zoom in on the demographics, the ‘age’ graph gives some interesting results:

inbound marketing survey results by age

The older the respondent, the more likely they are to know about and use Inbound Marketing. I though Inbound Marketing and Social Media would be a Generation Y thing!

Seasoned Marketers Know the Trends

If you then zoom in on the job level of respondents, we find a likely explanation. “Older” usually means markers in senior positions. And senior marketing executives have a helicopter view: they may not know the details, but they are good at spotting new trends and taking advantage of them.

Inbound Marketing survey results by job title

Is “Inbound Marketing” Approved?

I’d say “yes”. It clear that many B2B marketers know what it means, and many are already actively using it. Of course, the survey biased. LinkedIn users are more likely to know about Inbound Marketing than the average marketer, because LinkedIn is one of the Inbound Marketing tools. And people who don’t know what Inbound Marketing is could have simply skipped the poll.

For me personally: this blog is mainly read by innovators, so I should be safe to use Inbound Marketing as a well-known term. What is your take?

Use this link for the full results: Inbound Marketing Survey results

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2 thoughts on “Are You Old Enough for Inbound Marketing?

  1. Dale Underwood

    My take is that this is a fantastic “down and dirty” survey; good job. I hope you keep it running so you can re-publish the results at the Inbound Marketing Summit this fall with more respondents.

    Reply
  2. Jep Castelein Post author

    Hi Dale, unfortunately I have to pay LinkedIn 50 cents per answer. That is the only way I can randomly select the respondents (I selected people in Marketing in 4 tech-related industries).

    I can promote the poll with my readership for free, but then the answers would be biased towards the blog-reading B2B marketer (who tends to be more innovative).

    Jep

    Reply

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