It’s no secret that Inbound Marketing is growing quickly and the numbers seem to be growing too. Inbound Marketing, combining the word “in” with “marketer” and “marketing”, is defined as an online communications strategy designed to make an organization better known and achieve conversion rates. From their website, social media accounts and PR or CMO emails, organizations can help raise awareness, spread knowledge, and generate revenue, as well as provide a service for their customers.

Inbound Marketing by itself is nothing new, but there’s new investment in full-service marketing and customer relationship management (CRM) software. Social media, SEO and web site traffic can only do so much, and traditional marketing and promotion needs to be the business’s bedrock.

Yet, to create a compelling business case for Inbound Marketing, many executives and decision-makers need to re-evaluate the basic premise of marketing: to make revenue for its own sake. What can marketing do for customers to do? With custom CRM software, organizations can help their customers realize their full business potential.

Behind the scenes, marketers can proactively and effectively provide valuable business intelligence for their customers’ benefit. For example, marketers can:

Webinar through live video programming, inviting attendees to participate in an information exchange and asking questions that can help them grow their marketing strategy

Based on data gathered and insights generated, marketers can fine-tune messaging and performance metrics around specific aspects of their business

Inbound Marketing requires focused analysis. A strong combination of those tools help marketers measure and improve customer relationships in ways that have never been possible before.

Real-time data is the cornerstone of successful data management. Marketing automation software automates the web-based collection of analytics, including advertising and client reporting. A software system can then manage and organize the data, automate new requests, and provide more effective analytics as the year progresses.

Discovery is a critical building block in customer relations management. As organizations discover new customers, prospects, customers and so on, they need the ability to connect with them in real-time in the right format. The ability to create lists of who is talking about a company through various channels can help you tap into these opportunities and can create the power of up-sell or cross-sell opportunities.

Custom marketer also helps you personalize content to customers in a meaningful way to help them have a more enjoyable experience with your organization. Another benefit of custom marketer is the ability to create custom emails, especially tailored to individual customers based on data captured by the software.

Inbound Marketing also helps companies capture more data about their customers. Every customer has a personalized email tracking mechanism, and when they do, tracking and response statistics can enable you to see where your customers are in the buying cycle and where you can be more effective with your marketing.

While marketer education and CRM are very important building blocks, developers can help you launch inbound programs without a lot of work. That’s true because there are a number of high-performing applications to help you launch inbound programs faster.

Social media platforms are becoming indispensable, much as they were 10 years ago. Today, the majority of inbound programs are created via social channels. You can gauge customer engagements, find customers, and find insights about them and your marketing efforts. You can share updates to those audiences, use social to proactively engage with customers, and use tools such as social listening and the ability to track social media conversations. Using email automation technology, you can engage with those customers and help them discover and educate you on new opportunities.

The list of tools to launch inbound programs is very long, and I am not saying to eschew other tactics or tools that could work. Ultimately, however, what you need to be doing is allowing marketing to use the tools that will fit best with your business. If you see a one-size-fits-all approach that works well for your competitive landscape, then leverage that, but if you see that it will enhance your ability to have a meaningful inbound campaign, then you should use that.

This post is part of a series produced by FORBES and the IBM Global Business Services (IBM GS) in collaboration with Apple Pay. For more information on IBM Global Business Services (IBM GS), visit www.ibm.com/gbs.