I was visiting with a small software company a few weeks ago, with 10 employees and $1M in revenue. I asked them how they generated their revenue, and they proudly announced that they bought lists and did outbound calling. In fact, six of their 10 employees had some involvement with this outbound calling effort.
“Why did you decide on this method of marketing?” I asked. They told me that no one was coming to their website, so they decided they would “go to where their prospects are,” by telephone.
Being the good inbound marketing evangelist that I am, I began telling them about the process of driving visitors to their website, converting some of these visitors into leads, and turning some of the leads into sales. They listened politely, and then announced, “No more internet marketing consultants!”
Internet marketing consultants: All talk and no DO!
Over the past couple years, they’d hired three different internet consultants to learn how to get more web traffic — yet their traffic remained well under 1000 visitors per month. What was the problem?
The problem was that they were getting (mostly) great advice, but didn’t have the time to execute. They were all busy with what they already had on their plates and couldn’t take on this kind of major effort! The consultants they had hired all told them what to DO. . . but ignored the fact that they were already running full speed with their work and simply had no additional bandwidth.
Then they hired someone to “get it done,” and that person couldn’t manage all the different aspects of internet marketing, so quit after a few months.
What expertise is required for effective inbound marketing?
The exact expertise needed for successful inbound marketing varies a little from business to business, and industry to industry. But in general, some mix of the following skillsets is required:
- Copywriting and publishing
- Coding and programming
- Graphic design
- SEO
- Data
- Email marketing
- Social media engagement
- Project management
It’s pretty obvious that most people don’t come to a new job with all these skills!
But what if you could hire your own “brain trust” for internet marketing and have them execute the plan, too? And what if you could do this for the cost of a single employee? As I explained to this prospect, that’s exactly what you get when you partner with a creative inbound marketing agency!
The various people in the agency bring a wide variety of skills and knowledge, and stay current on the myriad of changes that happen every week among social media platforms, SEO, marketing best practices, etc. And inbound marketing agencies are designed around developing a strategy, and then executing the strategy. They are DO-ERS, not merely consultants. They work synergistically to serve their clients and regularly communicate about results, ideas for the future, what’s working and what’s not working.
In further conversations with this prospect, they asked me at least three different times, “And your agency does all this for us?” The answer was always, “Yes!”
What are your goals?
So if you wanted to grow your company, and found you could hire an entire group of marketing experts for the cost of a single employee, and that they would execute all the plans they came up with. . . well, that gives you some opportunity to really think about what your goals are. Where do you want your company to go over the next year? Over the next 3 years? 10 years? How can you leverage the power of the internet to achieve your goals? What is the best way to get started? How are you going to measure results? How quickly should you expect results?
All these questions and a hundred more can be answered by your inbound marketing agency. They will function as your outsourced marketing department and a valued partner who will bring new ideas to the table and will either train your team to execute or will execute these tactics themselves. They’ll also help you automate the whole process so that it works like a fine watch, ticking away and producing new leads and more sales-ready leads every day.
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