With the advent of HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2015 marketing and sales report, a whole host of interesting statistics and findings have helped uncover some very clear emerging trends.
Within this blog, we direct our focus on one particular trend: to successfully secure budget, businesses must be able to prove past successes.
Given all survey respondents expressed a desire for more budget and the two previous years have shown this area to be a consistently pressing issue amongst respondents, it is vital we explore just how business can begin to secure more budget moving forward.
Want To Spend More? Justify Your Current Budget
The results of the report converge toward a very simple truth: to justify greater budget allocation for tomorrow, your business needs to justify budget allocation and results, today.
The best way to do this is to demonstrate tangible success and how the budget utilisation has contributed. The report further supports this sentiment, outlining that the effective demonstration of positive ROI sees businesses nine times less likely to see a subsequent reduction in budget than the lack of any real ROI – it is a directly proportional relationship.
The reverse also mirrors this relationship – of the 3957 respondents HubSpot surveyed, those whose teams were able to demonstrate a positive ROI were over two times as likely to receive a higher budget for the following year.
As the above shows, the trends are clear: effective demonstration of a return from previous inbound marketing efforts, both significantly reduce the likelihood of reduced budget, and increase the likelihood of increased budget the next year.
Delving further into the report, respondents’ answers confirm inbound to be the preferred method of marketing for organisations spending less than £3M on marketing per annum.
In fact, the data has clearly shown that organisations spending less than £65K on marketing activity per year, are four times more likely to practice inbound marketing than outbound.
Given the trends illustrate that positive ROI is a central component of successful budget securement, a very interesting observation from the report is that each company surveyed, irrespective of their marketing spend, was three times more likely to experience higher ROI through the employment of inbound marketing practices than traditional outbound methods.
This suggests that the more marketing budget invested in inbound, the more likely you are to experience the positive ROI that is likely to lead to increased budget the following year.
It’s a potentially very profitable, self-sustaining dynamic: not only can inbound bring in leads, it can also help you secure that additional budget you’ve been pursuing.
As an award-winning, full-service marketing agency, our success here at Catalyst is predicated on an unyielding commitment to helping brands, like yours. With this, comes an obligation to significantly increase the ROI of our clients and, as the State of Inbound 2015 report concurs, the best way to do this is often through a strategy involving inbound marketing.