But how can a five step inbound marketing approach help you get - and stay - in front of your competitors? In our new eGuide: Zoober - The Inbound Marketing Methodology to Outflank Your Competition , we outline the five step process you need to take make inbound marketing work in your business: What’s involved with effectively building long-term connections with your customers. Marketing is changing - and changing fast. This is because inbound marketing offers new opportunities, new technologies and new techniques. Listening. MORE >>

And this means that digital communications have become a high priority to marketers. Below are a list of technologies and capabilities that are important tools for today's inbound marketer. Email marketing - email is still a critical tool in the lead generation arsenal. There is some overlap between "email only providers" and marketing automation providers (later in the list). Social Media Monitoring - in the digital economy, it is important to listen in on the conversations going on in your market. Solutions vary greatly in price and capability. MORE >>

Social media and inbound marketing techniques have been a boon for marketers. Not only do leads generated through social and content marketing cost half as much as traditional outbound-generated leads (see below), they also close at higher rate (again, see below). While prospective buyers are using search and social to research products and services before making purchase decisions, marketers and PR professionals can use those same tools to research buyer wants and needs. What marketing technique generates leads with the highest close ratio? Facebook. MORE >>

In a previous post I described how B2B Marketing professionals today view online marketing, employing the 4Cs: Campaign, Customer, Channel, and Customer. For this new content-driven strategy to function properly, a Marketing Automation system is essential, as it automates many of the labor-intensive tasks associated with deploying multi-channel campaigns and other outbound marketing tasks. It should be made clear to everyone reading, that online B2B Marketing absolutely requires the marrying of inbound marketing and marketing automation data. MORE >>

relevancy -- just a little fun ;) For years the world of b2b marketing has used outbound marketing as a source of lead generation. Our goal as marketers -- get the buyers to find relevant content, then find links to vendors, then capture their name as a lead (eventually). Classic inbound marketing. In order to capitalize on this, there's been a rush to successfully implement inbound marketing strategies so that we can capture the leads that are out there stumbling on our sites from various sources. Inbound marketing and outbound marketing. MORE >>