Did you know that around 93% of all web users begin their online journeys with search engines? What makes this statistic particularly remarkable is the fact that search engines continue to dominate the Web despite the popularity of social media sites and even basic email. Even though short cuts, bookmarks, and address bars make it easy to circumvent search engines to access our favorite sites, approximately 400 million people used Google during 2012.

The reason that search engines remain dominant can be attributed to the fact that most web users go online to access information. When it comes to internet searches more than half involve the researching of goods and services. Of course, internet marketers recognize this, which has led to the gradual development of a variety of inbound marketing strategies.

What is inbound marketing? A basic definition of inbound marketing is the utilization of various content marketing platforms to draw attention to a company and its products or services. Included among such platforms are blogs, video, podcasts, newsletters, email, social media, and more. As a matter of example of the effectiveness of inbound internet marketing, approximately 53% of online marketers used Facebook to generate sales leads during 2012, 34% got leads via Twitter, and 20% closed deals using Twitter.

At the moment, social media is one of the hottest inbound marketing tools, and 62% of marketing professionals believe that social media is crucial to successful online marketing. While that number may seem low, it is important to remember that social media marketing is still relatively new; and even though statistics show that it can be effective, there are obviously some skeptical marketers out there who are not convinced that social media is a critical element to online marketing

The definition of inbound marketing may be broad, but that only goes to show how diverse it is. Of course, in the realm of internet marketing, diversity is a good thing. After all, an effective online marketing campaign thrives on effective implementation of a diverse palette of strategies.