Top 9 Inbound Marketing Trends That Make It The Hottest Marketing Today!

Do you also wonder why Inbound Marketing trends as the hottest marketing approach?

Inbound Marketing has grown into the most powerful technique of marketing for doing business online. It has effectively defined a more streamlined approach to passively connect with your target audience by creating content, that your customer finds informative, in all shapes and sizes.

We are surrounded with the information abundance but attention scarcity – and this momentum of information creation is accelerating at a fast pace.

According to IBM, we now create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone.

Yes! It’s practically true.

Inbound marketing heavily relies on the existing customer data and search engine results to put the right content upfront for your audience. Your social media marketing data also plays a critical role here. Moreover, the hottest inbound marketing trends involve reimagining your customer experience to deliver truly incredible results, in the future.

The Inbound Marketing Trends Dominate the Outbound Marketing…

Outbound Marketing has ruled over the industry for several years. But the incoming inbound marketing methodology has outcasted the implementation of outbound strategies by a significant percentage.

Inbound marketing is a more trending marketing approach, today.

In comparison to outbound marketing, where marketers used to struggle a lot to find customers even after putting in the extra efforts, money, and resource; inbound marketing grabs the users’ attention much more efficiently and in a cost-free manner, making the company stand stronger and identifiable.

Term coined by HubSpot, Inbound marketing follows a core approach to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time. The content educates the audience about your brand, nurture them and eventually convert them into buyers.

So without much wait, let’s move to see the hottest marketing trends!

9 Hot Inbound Marketing Trends to Follow in 2022

1. The Hard Rock Concept of “Content is King” Still Prevails

Content is the key to thriving inbound marketing.

Writing quality content that is more targeted and unique for website visitors is less expensive than outbound marketing efforts and attracts more eyes. In many pieces of research and surveys, it is often witnessed that people prefer to grab information from the blog posts and articles to acquaint themselves with the company than from a traditional advertisement.

Moreover, Google also looks for the “High-Quality” content or E-A-T in compliance with the SEO-optimized long form content, blog posts, podcasts, white papers, etc. to demonstrate expertise, trust, and a certain level of authority in the industry to generate more potential leads.

2. Quality Drives in Better & Continuous Results

Although content is the soul of inbound marketing. But it will not derive your results from whatever you write. You’ll only be able to derive exceptional results from all your inbound marketing efforts when the quality of the content persists. Your content’s quality can even affect your site’s rankings, either positively or negatively.

Of course, it’s usually easy for visitors to pick up on this once they visit your site and see what’s there. However, now the search engines can also pick up on it too. In fact, search engines finding poor content on your site can further restrict all your opportunities to rank anywhere, reasoning a lack of trust in your website.

In 2021, Google released a statement explaining the criteria for quality content. Basically, quality content must represent E-A-T — or expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness — and those principles need to be seen throughout all aspects of your website. The page layouts, images used, and content created, everything needs to cohesively display a sense of quality.

3. Micro-Influencers are Second Leads

Micro influencing is one of the inbound marketing trends that will continue to rule in 2022 as well.

Generally, influencers are more connected with their followers and have a relatable connection, resulting which, their followers trust them. Hence, all the opinions they share are appreciated and can skillfully influence the behaviors of a target audience.

A study revealed that 82% of consumers take into consideration the recommendations of a micro-influencer that they follow (AdWeek).

Additionally, connecting with the A-listers to promote your brand and products can be really expensive, especially for small businesses and startups. However, by collaborating with micro-influencers, you can leverage their position to build brand awareness, promote content and connect with customers. The collaboration with micro-influencers promises higher ROI at lower costs, thereby, increasingly becoming a norm for small businesses.

4. Social Media Marketing is Growing Like Ever

Social media personalizes brands and can boost your number of followers (potential buyers). It also allows marketers to interact directly with their audiences. Marketers, today, preferably use social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with about 60% of businesses planning to grow their budget for Instagram marketing.

Although, the increasingly trending short videos and reels on every platform can be your best approach to engage with your target audience; You must also research and post a variety of content forms like interesting stories, Q&A, contests, etc. on the platforms most often used by your audience.

Moreover, to analyze your results from all the social media marketing efforts you’re putting in, pay attention to the likes, shares, and comments to specify if customers are engaging with your content and revise content as necessary.

5. Voice Search Continues to Trend

We know that SEO impacts inbound marketing and also that it is constantly evolving. Amidst all the latest developments in the SEO arena, “Voice Search” continues to trend since 2018 till date.

Voice search is one of the hottest inbound marketing trends. Its growth is partly attributed to the origin of AI bots like Alexa, Siri, etc.

In 2019, Approximately one-third of the US population used voice search feature for their shopping requirements. (eMarketer)

Moreover, a recent survey showed, that 115.2 million US shoppers used voice-activated devices at least once every month. This implies that many users have started using voice-assisted searches for their search queries. This increasing usage of voice-assisted devices and modifying user preferences reflect a glowing future of voice search. Therefore, businesses are adopting critical transitions to keep up with voice search changes and drive more traffic. Few of these transitions include –

• Adding a voice search snippet to blog posts
• Creating content that is direct and conversational
• Capture voice-search inbound leads and more.

6. Podcasts and Audio are Growing in Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is constantly witnessing the change in the content forms that dominate the industry from time to time. From text to images to video, there is no limit to creating interactive content for market leaders. In addition to them, Audio marketing is emerging as a much stronger form of content marketing. Audio marketing includes podcasts, audiobooks, and even talk shows as a method to attract inbound traffic.

Audio marketing was very well part of the traditional marketing practices like the radio ads, which were commonly used to increase brand awareness across towns, cities, and even larger areas. Nevertheless, podcasts could also be considered a powerful inbound methodology for brands focussing on educating their customers, reaching out to a streamlined audience, and trying to increase engagement.

Here are some podcast statistics that show the relevance of this marketing strategy:

• 66% of people prefer podcasts over TV.
• 58% prefer podcasts over social media
• 74% of people listen to podcasts to learn new things

Therefore, podcasts can prove to be a great marketing practice to reach out to those customers whom you want to educate, inform, and engage with on various marketing funnel stages of your inbound persona journey.

7. Short Videos are Casting Lasting Effects

Short videos like reels, YouTube Shorts, TikTok videos, etc. have relatively higher engaging value themselves when compared with traditional social media posts and regular videos. Thereby, they form great marketing practices, if implemented with a detailed research background and planning.

51% of marketers using short-form videos plan to increase their investments in 2022. (HubSpot)

They help you build brand awareness. They attract more targeted traffic by highlighting the main points in short videos than dwelling on deeper points with long videos. Whether you want to create clip for entertainment or educational purposes, there has never been a better time to start experimenting with this powerful form of content. In other aspects too, short videos are pocket-friendly marketing gimmicks with higher ROI ratios.

8. Marketing Automation is “IN”

Marketing is the art of connecting with the right audience while sales is the art of closing the deal. Amidst the individuality of marketing and sales practices, one of the most effective inbound marketing trends is to mix both, marketing and sales, together with by implementing the automations.

Marketing automation works similarly. It –

• Defines your target audience as accurately as you can.
• Distributes work amongst your workers.
• Decides which tasks can be automated and how.
• Describes your objectives
• Measures your progress.

One of the most promising aspects of marketing automation is to strategize and acquaint them with artificial intelligence. They, together, act as a force multiplier for your marketing team.

9. Optimize Your Featured Snippets

Google extracts the best text snippets that answer the searcher’s queries, evidently and concisely. It then places these text snippets on the top of the organic SERP along with the link to the main content page. Optimizing your content for the featured snippets will help you to be on top of the search results every time the related queries are searched. Therefore, they bring more visibility to your content and website along with the trust and authority of Google.

19% of SERPS have featured snippets, and 7.3% have double featured snippets. (Search Engine Journal)

A featured snippet captures half of your mobile screen and nearly one-third of your desktop search screens. To optimize your content for the featured snippet, you must –

• include long-tail keywords that directly address the information you believe your audience is seeking.
• create in-depth, high-quality, and easy to comprehend content that answers specific questions—format content into paragraphs, “how-to” sections, Q&As, lists, or tables.
• use defined headings and break long-form content into smaller sections, limiting each unit to 40 – 50 words.

Make the Inbound Marketing Trends Work for You!

Inbound Marketing is a trend. Today’s Online businesses are realizing that outbound marketing efforts alone aren’t enough to produce profits. Instead, inbound marketing techniques need to be utilized in order to attract more leads and foster better brand preferences.

To be a successful Inbound Marketer, Online businesses need to introduce a disciplined approach to content creation, and introduce marketing automation tools like HubSpot that can help them nurture and score leads, and optimize how these leads flow through the sales pipeline.

Drop a comment below and share what you feel about the inbound marketing trends and strategies in perspective to growing business marketing boundaries.