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There are a lot of inbound marketing tools on the market today, so it's sometimes difficult to know which ones are good and which ones aren't worth the time or money needed.

Luckily, the Flair Interactive team has done the hard work for you and we've identified four must-have inbound marketing tools that will make your job easier—and will provide a high return on investment if they're implemented the right way.

Check out our free listicle to learn about the latest and greatest inbound marketing tools!

So you've dipped your toes in inbound marketing in the past and never really saw much return on your investment. Maybe you decided to create a lot of content yourself or perhaps you paid an entire team of writers to crank out content, but it just never took off. You finally walked away, shaking your head at your naiveté and vowing to never get duped into inbound marketing again.

But then a funny thing happened. You learned about another supposedly "hot" tactic or approach and tried that too...with no better results. Or even worse, you found that you could only get good results with online marketing when you paid for it with an expensive paid search budget—which brought in loads of traffic and even some opt-ins, but those leads never converted into paying customers. So what gives, you ask? Does your content suck? Are you using the wrong marketing tactics? Should you fire your team members? There's a really easy answer.

Nobody wants what you're selling. Or rather, nobody wants to buy from you because of the WAY that you're selling your products or services. 

Are you afraid to give away too much information to your site visitors and followers? Don't be!

According to Hubspot, that's one of the top three fears that stop people from embracing the inbound methodology. But don't let this hold you back, since educating your visitors is one of the MOST important things you can do gain a following and attract people to your brand.

Other top concerns, says Hubspot, include changing an existing sales process or sharing sales and revenue data with marketing teams (who, ironically, are typically expected to increase sales and revenue).

Read this spooooooky post from Hubspot to learn more about why people are afraid to utilize Hubspot and inbound—and what you can do to overcome these fears and get a better ROI on your marketing:

http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/scary-fears-to-overcome

Check out this interesting chart from Google Trends. It shows the increase in relative searches for the term inbound marketing during the last ten years—from zero searches before 2007 to rapid and continuous growth from 2008 to present. (Note that this is showing relative interest over time—so it's not saying that there were only 100 searches total.)

The term “marketing automation” is well on its way to becoming a marketing industry buzzword, and rightfully so.  At this point, if you are an entrepreneur or business owner of any kind, you’ve surely heard the phrase used a time or two. So, by now, you must be wondering what all the fuss is about.

Check out this nifty infographic that we created about inbound marketing:

A member of one of my online groups asked this question the other day:

"We've got a LinkedIn page for the company, but we don't have many followers - any quick tips for getting more eyes on our profile?"

I hear this same question all the time! I thought I'd share my response here with you in case any of you are struggling with the same issue.

According to Hubspot's 2012 State of Inbound Marketing, 77% of B2C companies and 43% of B2B companies have acquired a customer through Facebook. In that same report, 62% of marketers reported that Facebook had become more imporant to their marketing mix during the previous six months.