Brand and Capture

Inbound Marketing Tips for Reaching Your Target Market

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Most businesses are jumping on the inbound marketing bandwagon. Facebook, Twitter and other social media marketing tools are proving to be far more effective -- and faster -- at marketing businesses to consumers and promoting brand identity. Compared to traditional outbound marketing methods like cold calling and direct mail, inbound marketing is targeted, rapid, interactive and the only way to reach today's Internet-connected consumers.

In the rush to move online, businesses often neglect to fully define their inbound marketing goals and develop a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy. Without careful forethought and planning, Internet marketing efforts can be ineffective and appear to be disjointed, failing to produce the desired results. Without proper goal definition and a well-planned strategy to meet those goals, inbound marketing experts warn that social media campaigns can fall flat and produce disappointing results. When Internet marketing campaigns fail, the fault is not in the inbound marketing techniques used but in their execution.

In order to connect with consumers, you must first figure out what consumers want. There are 3 tried and true methods of determining consumer needs relevant to the product or services you sell:

1. Ask. Pay attention to consumer questions asked via twitter, comments made on blog posts and surveys conducted on your website. See which web pages on your site have the highest click rates. Review sales statistics to see what consumers are buying. All of these efforts can help you gain a better understanding of what consumers are looking for when they access your site.
2. Tune in. Stay current on happenings and developments in your industry. Subscribe to competitors' blogs, follow industry experts on Twitter and subscribe to industry-related news feeds.
3. Track. Sign up for Google Alerts. Google Alerts is a particularly productive tool for monitoring the effectiveness of your keywords and fine tuning them to more accurately target your desired customer pool. Google Alerts shows you how other people on the Internet are using your keywords, providing you a window to competitors using the same words. Knowing who is using your keywords and how they are using them allows you to tweak your keyword list quickly if it isn't resonating correctly with consumers.

Professional inbound marketing experts have the technical expertise, Internet savvy and social media experience to ensure that your inbound marketing campaign is effectively designed and executed to produce the results you desire.

We Updated Our Website Design - Again!

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If you're new to our website, we hope you enjoy our brand new design. If you've been here before, you'll notice a major facelift. Yes, that's twice in the span of less than two years. Why did we do it? Are we obsessive about having a pretty website, or are there fundamental business reasons to redesign our site. I assure you, it's the latter. We're taking our company to a new level of business, and our website is leading the way. Here's our rationale for the update:

1. New Business Model - we're focusing on inbound marketing now. We still do brand development, graphic design and conventional marketing campaigns, but our emphasis is on getting our clients found online and capturing qualified sales leads using inbound marketing.
2. Work the Partnership - we're proud of our partnership with HubSpot, and we want to make sure our prospective clients know about it. We feel that HubSpot has the best software solution for inbound marketing, and we want to be known as one of the best service providers.
3. Growing and Changing - we're in a new office (since last year) and we've hired new people. We want to grow the company and become better known across the United States and even overseas.
4. New Ideas - we have lots of creative energy and ideas about new media marketing. We want to share those ideas with our visitors and subscribers.
5. Generate Sales Leads - if we're going to be doing this for our clients, we might as well start at home. 

So, how does a website redesign help to accomplish our goals?

• Updated, fresh, modern look and feel. These things still matter to people. If we're going to design a website for you, ours had better be first class.
• More interactive. Today's consumer wants to engage with us on blogs, social media, anywhere where we can find our audience and communicate with them. We made it easier to find these channels and include content from them on the website.
• Easier to navigate. We broke our content down into 2 main areas that our potential clients are seeking: 1. Building brand awareness and reputation and 2. capturing sales leads online. Now it's easy to find our solutions for those customer needs.
• Practice what we preach. Now you'll see calls-to-action on every page in prominent positions, landing pages that convey the offer and compel you to sign up as a lead. Lead nurturing campaigns to move potential customers down the sales funnel. We blog frequently about subjects that matter to our target audience. We optimize every page, blog post and social media update for search engines. Yes, we drink our own Kool Aid.

We hope you like the new design, but part of our inbound marketing mantra is to ask you how you feel about it.

Give it up - what's your reaction to our website makeover?

Keyword Optimization Is Key to Effective SEO

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Keyword optimization is a key factor in effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Choosing specific keywords to describe and identify your website and fine tuning those keywords to drive the greatest amount of traffic to your business is an art. Keyword selection is so critical to SEO success that many businesses hire an inbound marketing agency to ensure that their keyword list will have the impact they desire. Inbound marketing experts have the SEO, web analytics and HubSpot Keyword Grader expertise necessary to create a dynamic keyword list, track and measure the progress of each keyword, and tweak your keyword list regularly to most effectively meet your company's inbound marketing goals.

Keyword Strategy and SEO

Search engines rank sites using complex formulas that weight keyword prominence, frequency, density, proximity and placement. People often fail to give keyword selection the careful attention it requires. Poorly selected keywords that are not robustly related to your website will perform poorly, hurting your SEO ranking. Before investing time in SEO, take time to create an effective keyword list. 

To create an effective keyword list follow these steps:

1. Select keywords and keyword phrases. Read each page on your website and consider what it is about. Decide which words most accurately describe page contents. Consider the words a consumer is most likely to use to solicit that content. From your list, select one or two keywords per page and several less common words or phrases that might be triggered by multi-word searches.   
2. Sort by popularity. Using keyword grader and other web analytic programs, sort keywords and phrases by user popularity.
3. Tweak keywords and combinations of keywords in phrases to more closely match actual consumer use. Shuffle word combinations to achieve keyword phrases that resonate with consumers. Don't focus solely on the most common keywords in your business. Instead of trying to compete with top industry leaders for high rankings on the most frequently used keywords, improve your opportunity for SEO success by focusing on medium-use key words. Sometimes it's better to be a big fish in a little pond. Re-optimize pages to reflect keywords and keyword phrases.
4. Resort by popularity. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you achieve dependable results and periodically thereafter to maintain best SEO rankings.

What's your keyword strategy, and how well is it working?

Photo credit: ul_Marga

Social Media Marketing - Is That All You Got?

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I was inspired to write this post by a HubSpot webinar by Pete Caputa (aka @pc4media) in which he (nicely) flogged marketing agencies for "lite" services that no CEO needs. Primary culprit, social media marketing. Pretty much all marketing and PR agencies are either offering SMM as a service or are planning to. The question is, what's in it for the client?

Sell Value, Provide Value

That headline's almost a direct quote from Pete, and it rings home with me. Most companies hire marketing agencies because they want to make more money, not less. How? By generating more sales. How do we do that? By bringing in more qualified leads and delivering them to our clients' sales team in a nice pretty box. Social media marketing in the absence of a comprehensive lead generation strategy is fluff, in my humble opinion. I don't care how many uber-fans you have in Twitter and Facebook. If they aren't handing you their phone numbers and asking you to call, you have accomplished exactly "nada".

Where Does Social Media Marketing Fit In?

In the grand scheme of inbound marketing, social media is more of a means than an end. It's an important tool in increasing brand awareness and building retention. It can help drive people to the site to sign up. BUT social media is not a task you can check off on a list. It's not a goal, and it's not a deliverable. It's a way to help you get there. If you want to sell (and deliver) value, you have to capture leads and convert them to customers. Let's review how that's done:

1. Be the #1 source of valuable information, products and services in your field or industry
2. Convince everybody the #1 is true by virtue of your blogs, webinars, videos, social media etc. Just be awesome, and people will think you are awesome.
3. Think of your website as your office. That's where everybody goes to do business with you. Is there a sign on the door (that tells people what you do). Is the door open? When people come to talk to you, do you take down their name, address and phone? Of course you do - so start doing that on your website.
4. Tell people what you want them to do. That's what your call to actions do. Want them to sign-up for a free pumpkin? Tell them in your CTA and point them to your landing page.
5. Don't assume everyone wants a free pumpkin. People are curious and they will check out your free pumpkin landing page. You have their attention. Convince them to sign up.
6. Free pumpkins deliver $0 to the bottom line. All you have now is a lead, but that's a lot better than no lead. Yes, you are filling the funnel now. Work it. If you have a phone number, call. If not, set up a lead nurturing campaign to further interest them. The more time they invest coming back for your stuff, the more likely they will convert. Use the technology that's out there - HubSpot, Salesforce, whatever you have - use it to track and work your leads.
7. Deliver value. Measure your leads and sources. Analyze, adjust and keep fighting the good fight. Build on success and discard the stupid ideas. Show the CEO how you are delivering dollars and driving ROI.

Ok, so you're a marketing company, and yes you need to follow these steps for your own lead generation and sales. More importantly, you need to do the same thing for your clients. And, oh yes, don't forget to tell people that you do this stuff. It's not social media marketing, folks. It's lead generation and conversion marketing - it's inbound marketing.

Any questions? How did I do, Pete?

Photo Credit: Stefson

Blogging is a Key Part of Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

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Your business blog is an essential part of your inbound marketing strategy. Your blog should provide interesting insights into your business - not just what your company is doing, but what's happening in the industry. You can use your blog to establish your leadership in your industry by providing expert commentary and helpful solutions. Visitors will read and subscribe to your blog if they feel it is valuable and not too self-promotional. Remember, it's not a newsletter or a webcam showing your employees working. Nobody cares about that. Your blog is for reaching out to communicate with your market and for building a loyal following with consistently excellent content. Think of your blog as a spider web that helps you capture leads brought in from your social media venues and search engines. A well crafted blog post not only interests readers but also inspires them to post links in social media and sign up for offers on your landing pages.

Why do so many business blogs get sidetracked?

Blogging is hard work and can be quite time consuming. If you're doing it right, your blog is well written and optimized for seo with important keywords. Not every company has a designated person or team capable of writing about their business not only with authority but in an engaging voice. Fewer still have professional seo experts on staff. Even those who have a talent for writing can feel overburdened by the pressure to create blog entries on a regular basis. For blogs to work their marketing magic, new posts should be published at least three times a week, or about every other day. Many business people simply don't have the time or resources -- or continuous flow of ideas -- to maintain the level of commitment successful marketing blogging requires.

Naturally, there are solutions. Many firms are now turning to professional blog writers or inbound marketing agencies to design and manage a comprehensive blogging plan, to provide original content and to optimize each post for search engines. Contracting out inbound marketing, including blogging, allows them to tap into resources and professional expertise most businesses can't afford to employ. Agencies can arrange for professional writers to update and maintain a company's blog site. Ghost writers typically write as staff members and sometimes as the business principal. Contracting out your blogging services allows you to focus on your business while reaping the marketing benefits blogging can provide.

How's your blog performing as an inbound marketing magnet? We can help.

Photo Credit: Mrs Magic.

How to Close the Loop Using HubSpot and Salesforce

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We often talk about (and promote) inbound marketing as an effective means of generating qualified sales leads via content creation, social media and lead capture strategies. But that's only half the battle. Once you have qualified leads, you want to convert them to customers, hopefully loyal, repeat customers over time. Inbound marketing by itself doesn't do that. "Closing the loop" refers to exchanging information back and forth between sales and marketing, however that's defined in your company, in order to optimize lead-to-customer conversions. Here's how we accomplish closed loop marketing using HubSpot and Salesforce.com.

HubSpot/Salesforce Integration

In case you're not familiar with HubSpot and Salesforce, HubSpot is the leading inbound marketing platform that incorporates content marketing, social media marketing, seo, lead generation and analytics under one roof. Salesforce.com is the leading online customer relationship management system (CRM). HubSpot has built-in integration with Salesforce, available in the Medium and Large packages. The first step is integrating the two platforms. Here is a step-by-step guide. You should become proficient at using both platforms using their excellent tutorials. Our sales and marketing team is already integrated, but if you have separate teams or departments, make sure that they are trained in using both platforms. This step will help your sales team understand the inbound marketing process and your marketing team will gain direct knowledge of the downstream sales process and the status of leads as they proceed through the sales funnel. Now that you've handled the nuts and bolts let's look at how we roll in closing the loop.

Closed Loop Marketing Workflow

1. Lead Response - We have set up protocols so that when a lead comes into our Salesforce.com account from HubSpot, a designated member of our team always responds within one hour of notification. This gives the lead a great first impression and sets a time for a follow-up phone call.
2. Lead Assignment and Classification - Each lead gets assigned to a sales person, who then becomes responsible for the account going forward. The sales person will review the lead information supplied by HubSpot landing pages and viewable from within Salesforce and update their status as having been contacted. A phone meeting is set up through Salesforce as an event, which appears on the sales person's calendar. All lead activities, opportunities and events are available to the entire team via reports that appear on each team member's Salesforce home page.
3. Account Creation and Closing Steps - Following the initial sales call, unless it turns out to be a dud, we convert each lead into an Account, update any contact information need, and create an opportunity for the sale. If a demonstration or formal presentation is warranted, we set that up as a new event. In most cases we succeed in interesting the lead enough to request a sales proposal, which we create and store under the Notes & Attachments section, and we send them an e-mail with the proposal attached. We then set up a follow up call as an event within a few days of sending the proposal. During the follow up call we review the proposal and ask for the sale. More often than not, we succeed.
4. Monthly Review - While we are constantly monitoring our lead, account and sales reports via Salesforce and HubSpot, we also schedule a monthly review with our team to address any problem accounts, training issues and to provide feedback for our inbound marketing efforts. Our goal is to have 1-2 new advanced content publications (such as webinars, e-books or social media promotions) running each month, so we evaluate the effectiveness of each in generating new, qualified leads that turn into customers.

Benefits of Closed Loop Marketing

We have already seen tremendous benefits from integrating our sales and marketing process via HubSpot and Salesforce. In general we are seeing:

1. Improved response time to leads
2. Higher lead-customer conversion rates
3. Fewer lost opportunities due to inaction or lost information
4. Higher productivity for our sales team (less time wasted looking for information)
5. Improved customer relations due to sales force automation
6. Improved inbound marketing content and social media marketing due to feedback from the sales team

We will quantify these results in a future post as we gather more data.

What tools do you use to close the loop between sales and marketing?

We can help you with your closed-loop marketing via HubSpot and Salesforce.

Budgeting for Inbound Marketing

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Business owners and executives considering adding inbound marketing to their marketing plan wonder how much to spend each month. What is a reasonable budget that will yield results justifying your program and meeting marketing objectives? As always, it depends on the goals of your marketing strategy. For businesses seeking to increase sales through online marketing, we are starting to understand the costs and benefits of inbound and social media marketing. Here is a framework for creating a solid budget for your company.

One of the common urban legends about inbound and social media marketing is that they are inexpensive. While fixed costs may be lower than traditional advertising and marketing, labor costs are higher. Our estimated budget is for labor costs, which is by far the largest component of any inbound marketing/social media program. Other fixed costs, such as software, hardware and subscriptions will need to be added. Let's break it down by the disciplines required for increasing sales leads through inbound marketing:

Inbound Marketing Strategy and Analysis

You will want to spend at least 2 hours per month on strategy, analysis of results and planning with an experienced strategist in inbound and social media marketing. One of the key principles of inbound marketing is review, analysis and adapting your strategy to improve results. While top level consultants often charge more than $300 per hour, you could probably negotiate this as part of a larger package deal for around $500 per month.

Blogging

A recent study by HubSpot of over 760 companies engaged in inbound marketing found that "leads started to grow once blogs offered a critical mass of articles, on the order of 20 to 50 articles" per month. Although it's certainly possible to write a blog post in a few minutes, most bloggers will tell you that if you account for idea creation, research, copywriting, SEO on-page optimization, and social media promotion, we're looking at 1-2 hours per post, perhaps more, depending on the blogger's experience level and familiarity with SEO and social media. According to HotGigs.com, average hourly rates for bloggers are about $30 per hour. This gives us a range of $600 - $3,000 to budget for blogging each month. According to ReadWriteWeb, a reasonable budget for most companies would be about $1,500 per month.

SEO

You will need someone to oversee and execute your search marketing strategy. This includes keyword research, on-page and off-page search engine optimization for your website, social media optimization for your social networks and pay-per-click campaigns. I'm not including on-page SEO for your blog, since you paid for that in the previous section. The amount of time required depends on the amount of content your site contains and the amount you add per week. If your company is somewhat active (and you should be to improve online lead generation), let's assume 1-2 hours per day is reasonable. According to SEOmoz, mid-level SEO consultants charge $100-200 per hour. At a minimum you're looking at $2,000 per month. Again, you could probably negotiate that down to $1500 per month as part of a package.

Social Media

This is a more difficult area to quantify, because the nature of social media interaction involves a variety of activities, including listening (monitoring), engaging (commenting and conversing), and creating (new comments, tweets, etc). According to Chris Brogan, "two hours a day is a minimum for MOST efforts". Many business people would find it hard to invest that much time each day, but the activities could be divided up among several employees or outsourced. Assuming that a good social media strategy and plan is in place and we're budgeting for daily activities, if we take 2 hours as our minimum for social media activities, that's an average of 40 hours per month. If you hired an agency to do your social media marketing for you, for example a HubSpot Partner, you would pay at least $75 per hour for these services. At 40 hours per month, that translates into a budget of $3,000 a month. You could probably negotiate a lower rate or package deal, so let's put our stake in the ground at $1,500 per month.

Advanced Content/Social Media Campaigns

Regular blogging, seo and social media activities will get you well down the road to improving brand awareness, web traffic and leads, but there is no substitute for high impact content, like webinars, videos and whitepapers and the social media campaigns to promote them. Your content team can produce some of these special projects as part of their regular activities with personal video cameras and publication software, but more sophisticated content with professionally produced video, music and graphics will cost extra. Costs for these types of content and campaigns vary considerably, but count on $2,000-$10,000 per campaign.

Bottom Line

Routine Inbound Marketing: $5,000 per month

Special Projects: $2,000 - $10,000 per month

Budget Range: $84,000 - $180,000 per year

Return on Investment

If you can generate enough sales from your inbound marketing program to exceed the budget (and you don't overspend the budget), you have achieved a positive ROI. On a monthly basis, can you generate $7,000 to $15,000 in sales? If not, should you consider a scaled-back program? Remember that your lead volume and conversion will most likely drop accordingly.

In-house or Outsource?

Consider the costs of hiring experienced people who can perform the above tasks. Here's our summary of costs involved with building your own inbound marketing team. You may find that it's less expensive to at least start with an inbound marketing agency, build up your current team's experience with time, and avoid new hires.

What's your experience budgeting for inbound marketing? We'd love to hear from you.

Please feel free to contact us to discuss your inbound marketing program.

Conversion Rate Optimization Using HubSpot Lead Generation Tools

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The general goal of conversion rate optimization (CRO) is to maximize lead conversion rates for landing pages by means of testing and analysis. In layman terms, we are trying to find the best strategy, design, layout and content to grab visitors' attention and convert them to leads. There are two main approaches, (1) pre-publication research, such as focus groups, and (2) post-publication testing, such as A/B or multivariate testing of landing pages. We will focus on the second approach using the HubSpot inbound marketing system.

Lead Conversion Strategy

Regardless of your chosen approach to CRO, you should start with a coherent lead conversion strategy. What are you trying to accomplish with your landing page? What's your offer, and why should your visitors be interested? What's in it for them? No one will convert unless there is a clear value proposition. You can't assume that they are predisposed to buy your products and services. Instead, think about what they want or need and how you can satisfy those desires to attract them into your sales funnel. This is often where companies will conduct market research to pinpoint those desires.

Landing Page Optimization

Once you have chosen a strategy, the next step is to create one or more effective landing pages. Each landing page design must convey the offer. What is the offer? What's in it for the visitor? How do they get it? From a landing page design perspective, you must remove all possible barriers or sources of distraction and focus the visitor's eye (and will) on the offer and the button that commits them to it. Common errors include having the offer and conversion button below the fold (off the screen) and having other calls-to-action or links on the  landing page that may cause your visitor to leave prematurely. In the HubSpot system you can easily create landing pages using the Create > Landing Pages wizard. The wizard guides you through the process of building an effective landing page and advises you on where and how to include your offer. HubSpot also offers tutorials and on landing page and lead conversion best practices.

One of the foundations of CRO is testing. By creating and publishing multiple versions of a landing page with different layouts, text and designs you can directly measure conversion rates. For example, you can try an A/B test by creating two different versions of a landing page, then marketing them separately by e-mail or pay-per-click campaigns. Assuming that the markets being tested by your campaigns are identical, you can directly measure the effectiveness of one landing page compared to the second. You can monitor progress in HubSpot by viewing the Convert > Landing Pages report. If a more sophisticated analysis is desired, you can submit your landing pages to the Google Website Optimizer, a free tool that analyzes landing pages in A/B or multivariate tests. In the case of multivariate testing, you are trying different combinations of content on a single landing page to find the best mix.

The Lead Generation Campaign

Getting people to your optimized landing page is also a crucial part of your  CRO strategy.  On your website and blog, you need clear, well-designed, well-positioned calls-to-action that catch a visitor's eye and compell them to click through to your landing page. Your call-to-action could be a graphic (button) or a link. In either case, it must be consistent with the offer on the landing page and convey a sense of urgency. The same strategy applies to your e-mail marketing, pay-per-click or social media campaigns. Testing is useful here as well. Try different calls-to-action versions on the same page (leading to the same landing page) and run them for periods of time in which you accumulate the same number of page views. Such an A/B test will tell you which call-to-action is most effective. You can also do multivariate testing here to optimize the positioning and selection of multiple calls-to-action on one page.

Advanced Testing and Analysis

If you have the nice problem of large amounts of traffic and leads on your site, you may want to consider more sophisticated CRO solutions. In this case you may be able to afford the cost of professional CRO services and high-end CRO software solutions used by large brands and e-commerce companies. Some of the players on the software side include Omniture, Maxymiser, SiteSpect, Vertster, Autonomy, Marketo and Ion Interactive.

What are your strategies for conversion rate optimization?

Certified HubSpot Partners Add Value

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If you're interested in inbound marketing, you know about HubSpot. They're the industry leaders in inbound marketing software, and their customer list is growing rapidly among small and large companies in all industries, b2b or b2c. An important new development within the past year has been the HubSpot Certified Partner program, in which agencies must pass a rigorous exam on inbound marketing and HubSpot technology in order to become certified. Partner agencies are qualified to sell inbound marketing services and are promoted via the HubSpot Service Marketplace. Here's how these partner agencies add value to companies engaged in inbound marketing.

Extending Your Team

Partner agencies can create a working strategy and plan for your company, then, depending on the scope of the service contract, do some or all of the work to get your company found online, capture leads and convert them to customers. Services may include:

• Inbound Marketing and Social Media Strategy
• Custom designs for your HubSpot site
• Blog writing and advanced content, such as webinars or videos
• Search engine optimization and social media optimization
• Social media monitoring
  
• Social media engagement and promotion
• Social media campaigns, such as Facebook or Twitter offers or events
• Call to action and landing page strategy and design
• Lead nurturing campaigns
• Lead conversion analysis and web analytics
• Advanced training in HubSpot and other technologies

Improving Results

You can work with your Certified HubSpot Partner to achieve specific goals, such as improved web traffic, keyword ranking and lead conversion. You can monitor progress through the HubSpot reports and optimization tools. You can improve your own staff's understanding and experience in inbound marketing by having them work side-by-side with your HubSpot partner with the goal of eventually bringing all of the work in-house.

Going Beyond

Your HubSpot Partner agency has a different perspective in addition to being an inbound marketing agency. Most of the Partners have strong experience in advertising and marketing, internet marketing and web design. They can leverage this experience to provide you with an optimized strategy and use their knowledge to create and manage goal-oriented marketing campaigns both online and offline. They can make your HubSpot website stand out from the crowd. They can find the right mix of marketing to fit your company's objectives and budget.

Hire a HubSpot Certified Partner today! You'll be glad you did. 

Inbound Marketing Agency or DIY?

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If you're a C-suite executive or business owner, chances are you've been talking to yourself a lot lately. The economy is much slower to rebound than we hoped. You must control costs since earnings are weaker than expected. You can't stop marketing, but marketing is your number one expense other than payroll. What's the best course of action?

According to a recent survey of over 200 business leaders like you, companies using inbound marketing as their primary marketing strategy average 60% lower cost per sales lead than those using traditional outbound techniques.  Social media and blogs ranked at the top of the list of the most effective and cost-effective methods of generating new leads. Of the companies surveyed, small business are particularly active, spending over 40% of their lead generation budget on inbound marketing. Assuming that inbound marketing does generate more cost-effective leads than traditional marketing, how do companies choose between in-house and outsourced inbound marketing strategies?

The bottom line for most of you is cost. While it's true that you can reallocate some or most of your marketing budget in the direction of inbound marketing, how much is enough, and where do you start? Let's look at the cost factors for in-house inbound marketing vs. hiring an inbound marketing agency:

Roll Your Own Inbound Marketing Team

1. Planning and Strategy - Do you have the expertise to do this, or do you need to hire a consultant? Do you have a social media policy in place? When do you plan to start? If you're already active in inbound marketing, where do you go from here?
2. Hiring - Who's going to manage the operation? Do you have one or more experienced bloggers? Can they blog several times a week with an eye towards improving SEO results? What about social networking? Do you have a team ready to engage, promote and monitor social media every day. What about putting together Facebook and Twitter campaigns? What about creating graphics and video for your inbound marketing blogs and campaigns? Somebody needs to analyze the results and make recommendations for new content and new strategies. People with these skillsets can be expensive. Here's a resource we put together summarizing these costs.
3. Fixed costs - Do you have an inbound-marketing-ready website, complete with blog, calls-to-action, landing pages, seo tools, analytics and reporting? You can do these things piecemeal, but what's the labor cost of compiling and analyzing results from diverse sources? If you purchase an integrated solution, like HubSpot, there's a monthly cost associated with the license. If you use other for-fee resources for webinar, video hosting, video production, or podcasting, you must figure those into your budget as well.

Hiring an Inbound Marketing Agency

1. Do they provide all of the functions you need, or just a subset? Can they provide strategy, website design, graphic design, blogging, social media  setup and engagement, seo, analysis and reporting? if the answer is "no" to any of these, you will want to fill in the gaps with another firm or consultant.
2. Do they customize their services to fit your needs, or do they only offer a one-size-fits all package?
3. Do they have a track record that they are willing to share with you? Inbound marketing hasn't been around all that long, so if they claim several years of experience, they're talking gibberish.
4. Do they have a proven background in marketing, experience that they can leverage to bring the "marketing" part of inbound marketing? Or are they specialists in one aspect, such as SEO, and now claim to do the rest?

So it's up to you, weighing the short and long-term benefits of inbound marketing versus outbound marketing. Can you revitalize your marketing results using inbound techniques yet save costs at the same time? A growing list of companies of all sizes would answer "yes". Don't take my word for it. Read many blogs, e-books and whitepapers on the subject. Ask lots of questions of agencies like ours and other businesses engaged in inbound marketing. In this new "social mediasphere" people are far more likely to share this information with you. At least bring in some outside to help in the planning stages. They can assist you in estimating the costs and benefits of inbound marketing to help you make a more informed decision for your company.

Let us know if you'd like a free consultation.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldeconomicforum/ / CC BY-SA 2.0