For the last few years, much of the conversation around inbound marketing has focused on B2B (business to business) companies more than B2C companies. The reason for this is simple: B2B companies typically have long sales cycles that can last for weeks or months, and inbound marketing is exactly what they need to keep customers engaged, informed, and actively moving forward on the sometimes long and winding customer journey.

The online marketing vocabulary is full of terms that we at Leap Clixx live and breathe all day, every day – and yes, it’s both highly rewarding and tons of fun.

In the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, an Iowa farmer hears a voice in his cornfield tell him, “If you build it, he will come”. So, he built it, Shoeless Joe shows up and we all get one of the best baseball movies of all time.

A University of Southern California study led by professor Dr. Marin Hilbert discovered that the average person is bombarded with a whopping 174 newspapers worth of data each day which means we've clearly gone from the Information Age to the Age of Information Overload.

One of the defining features of inbound marketing is that businesses can use automated workflows to help guide the buyer’s journey. Before exploring how this happens, let’s first shine a spotlight on the buyer’s journey, since it’s a relatively recent concept.

While inbound marketing isn’t rocket science (at least we assume it isn’t), it’s true there are some aspects, concepts, strategies and tactics that have some complexity to them.

In life, we often come across warning signs that, in retrospect, seem abundantly clear - kind of like giant billboards rather than subtle cues.

If you belong to a B2B or B2C cloud-based companies, especially those in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry, you know how critical it is to get out in front of prospective customers during the fleeting decision-making stage. 

It’s an industry of short sales cycles with complex products, acronym-laden jargon, freemium trials and ever-changing services that must be marketed precisely or you risk confusing your audience. It's also an industry where inbound marketing can give you the strongest foothold for reaching your customers.

While there are many aspects of inbound methodology that makes it both innovative and effective, perhaps the most striking – and certainly the most interesting – is that it’s actually a far “truer” kind of marketing, than what we’ve been calling marketing for the last few decades.