“50 percent of IT spending outside of the IT budget goes through marketing departments,” or so says Laura McLellan, Gartner's vice president of marketing strategies.  But where is all of that IT money going?  Let’s take a look at where marketing execs are spending all those tech dollars.

The areas that marketing departments are throwing their budgets fall neatly into 3 categories:

• Marketing Automation – to increase the effectiveness of the marketing processes themselves.
• Social technology and mobile technology – to reach people when they aren’t working, and when they aren’t at a computer during their everyday lives.
• Analytics for real-time business intelligence – for business intelligence that moves at the speed of the digital era. Allows for immediate adjustments to strategy by catching trends as they happen rather than after the fact.

Inbound marketing, simply put, is getting the customers to find you rather than trying to find them, and these areas help businesses to not only reach more people, but also assist in reaching a better quality of person. By quality, we mean that they are more likely to follow the path of breadcrumbs laid out by the marketer to the ultimate goal. That goal may be a donation, a sale, or maybe just a web page view. When the customer reaches this ultimate goal, it's called a conversion. 

With a well-tuned inbound marketing machine, the flow of leads, or potential conversions, dwarfs the streams of leads generated by outbound marketing techniques such as call centers or mailings.  You can call 1,000 people to tell them about your widget (outbound marketing) or you can get your current customers to like or follow you on social media and put a company coupon in front of their friends (inbound marketing).  Inbound marketing has the potential to reach many more people, but you also know that anybody who clicks on that coupon is a qualified lead.  Which means they are more likely to let go of their money to get one of your widgets.

Inbound marketing is tech-intensive because, in the digital era, consumers are tech-intensive. It’s no surprise that a high percentage of tech dollars are flowing through marketing departments. Companies around the world are shifting to an inbound marketing strategy, and as they do, budgets will be shifting too.