It's called "inbound marketing" and it's an educational and informational approach to reaching target markets via Websites, blogs, and social media.

The report describes inbound marketing as "a set of marketing strategies and techniques focused on pulling relevant prospects and customers toward a business and its products... Inbound marketers offer their audiences useful information and tools to attract these people to their site, while also interacting and developing relationships with individuals on the Web."

Here are summarised highlights:

• Inbound marketing channels cost less. "Inbound marketing-dominated organisations experience a cost per lead 62% lower than outbound marketing-dominated organisations."
• Blogs and social media channels generate customers. "Fifty-seven percent of companies using blogs reported that they acquired customers from leads generated directly from their blog," according to the report. Blogs were reported as being written daily by 10 percent of respondents, 61 percent weekly, and 29 percent monthly or less often.
• More and more businesses have incorporated blogging into their marketing tactics. "Businesses are now in the minority if they do not blog. From 2009 to 2011, the percentage of businesses with a blog grew from 48% to 65%."
• Businesses are becoming more aware of blogging value. "Eighty-five percent of businesses rated their company blogs as 'useful, important or critical,' and a whopping 27% rated their company blog as 'critical' to their business."

In the current business economy, it makes sense to focus on the cost-lowering advantage of using inbound marketing vs. traditional marketing approaches.

Blogs, social media, and organic search (SEO) receive top billing in the report as the least expensive lead-generation categories. The numbers show that marketing budgets support inbound marketing as well: 54 percent of the individuals surveyed are increasing their inbound marketing budgets; 35 percent report no change; and only 11 percent were planning to lower the spend on inbound marketing. The average portion of the marketing budget dedicated to inbound marketing increased from 38 percent to 41 percent from 2009 to 2011.