Inbound marketing is getting easier every day, so you’re probably asking yourself, “Should I hire an inbound marketing agency?” New tools for email marketing, keyword analysis, marketing campaign optimization, database integrations, and ROI tracking can all be yours for a small monthly fee (each). If there is no room in the budget for an inbound marketing agency, then a do-it-yourself approach to inbound marketing might seem attractive. After all, you can do everything that we do, given a little time, right?Well… yes and no. There is no magic in what we do (although sometimes we like to think there is), and the fact that we learned how to do this certainly suggests that you can also learn how to lay the foundations for successful inbound marketing, too. It just depends on how you want to use your time.
Inbound marketing takes time away from everything else
Every hour you spend on creating your own inbound marketing program you could be:
- Further developing your business model
- Networking with other people
- Working down your to-do list
- Testing out that new piece of software you just installed
- Acquiring new clients and referral partners
- Coming up with new business ideas
- Engaging with your staff and/or customers
- Attending a lunch meeting where you can meet new people
- Exploring how to make your staff more productive
- Reading for your own personal development
- Expanding your leadership skills
These are things an inbound marketing agency can’t do for you — you need to do them for yourself.
What opportunities are you missing by not hiring an inbound marketing agency with a specialized and highly trained team that can accomplish your vision faster and more profitably?
Look at it this way: I spend 3-4 hours a week creating blog posts. What opportunities would you be missing if you spent 3-4 hours a week blogging? What opportunities are you missing by not hiring an inbound marketing agency with a specialized and highly trained team that can accomplish your vision faster and more profitably?
What does it cost to hire an inbound marketing agency? Less than the cost of hiring one new employee. And as an agency, we have the training and experience to develop and execute a sound inbound marketing strategy for your company, while training some of your staff to take over some of the marketing responsibilities, and training your salespeople about how inbound marketing delivers great leads for them.
An inbound marketing agency brings its own tools
Sure, you can go out and get Google Analytics, Aweber, fast website hosting, a blogging platform like WordPress, HootSuite, and a CRM. Then take the time to understand how each of these things works, and figure out how to get them all to share information. But do you have time for this?
Our inbound marketing agency uses HubSpot for all core inbound marketing activities. We chose HubSpot for two reasons:
- It’s easier to use one platform that has best practices baked into it across all inbound marketing activities.
- It’s better. We can show you the analytics which underpin every website activity, and tell you what percent of your new leads came from a particular post on LinkedIn. Are you a visual learner? How ’bout instant charts and graphs of where all your website traffic came from and which of those channels was the most effective at producing leads?
And did I mention that we’re already invested the training time — in fact, we’re beta testers for new HubSpot features!
“Just do it!”
Ok, so you probably don’t have time to do this yourself. But what about hiring a new employee and making her responsible for your inbound marketing program? You bring on Susie, who is pretty good at Facebook and knows how to send emails, and you tell her, “Just do it and keep me posted on the results.”
Unfortunately Susie doesn’t even understand what all the various pieces of inbound marketing are, much less how to integrate them into a smooth-running lead generating machine. But for the same money (or less) that you’re paying Susie, you can hire an experienced marketing team that will work with you to develop a strategy that fits your goals, develop tactics to implement that strategy, AND do the daily and weekly work necessary to achieve success (as measured by more sales).
The bottom line is always ROI
If we’re not producing a strong positive ROI for your company, you shouldn’t be working with us!
We measure everything, and insist on tracking our clients’ inbound marketing ROI. ROI is simply the financial gain from inbound marketing, divided by the total cost of inbound marketing. We think it’s ultimately the only way to measure inbound marketing success!
Because we’re measurement “freaks”, we always have plenty of data to use for calculations, and all of our data is 100% available to our clients at all times. (Basically, we give you full access to our analytics platform.) So while we can “slice and dice” a lot of different ways, calculating ROI is very straight-forward and easy to do. When’s the last time one of your employees calculated their ROI and reported it to you?
The best way to make sure that your inbound marketing produces the results you want is to hire an inbound marketing agency. It costs less than hiring an employee, and provides and experienced inbound marketing team to help your business grow. At the end of the day, inbound marketing is about producing results, and if your marketing goals are properly aligned with your business objectives (hint: sales and profit), you need a metrics-based inbound marketing agency to fuel your growth.
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