Yippee! Your CEO is onboard and giving you the green light to move forward with inbound marketing. Now what? How did you begin to establish the strategy? Do you have all the internal resources you need? Do you need to move a bed into your office because you’ll be working 24/7 during your current job and implementing and managing your inbound marketing program, too?
Plan Inbound Wisely
Inbound marketing involves the right mix of remarkable content that captures your buyer’s attention, delivered in the channel your buyer appreciates at the perfect time for them with the intent of attracting them to your website for engagement. This methodology results in proven sales and marketing efficiency, effectiveness and growth.
However because inbound methodology is still relatively new, it’s not usual for your internal team to lack the necessary skills that will give you the efficiency, effectiveness and results you need. As a result, businesses like yours that want to take advantage of the sustainable ROI typically seek outside agencies for help.
An inbound agency uses their extensive digital experience to help companies and businesses short on time and internal resources increase their online visibility and lead generation efforts. However, just like traditional outbound agencies offer different levels of expertise, so do inbound agencies.
4 Gotta Know Facts About Selecting An Inbound Agency
Selecting the right inbound partner to work with is the first step to success. Although there are many things to consider when choosing an agency, the following are the most important elements to ensure favorable ROI for your program.
- Is the agency asking you insightful questions? You need someone who is experienced, right? Then they should be asking many questions about your business goals and operations to be able to produce an effective inbound marketing strategy. They should be as hungry as you are to see your business grow!
- Can the agency generate traffic to your website? What is the agency doing that will get visitors to your website? Are they proficient at using SEO, blogging and social media? Do they have your strategy mapped out? Can they demonstrate how they use inbound marketing for their own agency to get traffic?
- Can the prospective agency demonstrate your results with data? They need to be able to measure your results and continue to tweak elements in your campaign or content to meet the needs of your personas to convert them from visitors to qualified leads, and eventually, sales. Reporting and measuring should be the lifeline of your agency partner. They should continue to measure to increase your ROI
- Can they give you proof of ROI for their existing clients? If they claim they can get results, they should be able to show you examples of their work. Can you really see they started with a campaign, tweaked, tested and worked the campaign again to get results? You need to see the proof, and they should easily provide this for you.
Thoughts to Ponder
The excitement of receiving approval to move forward with an inbound marketing program is short lived as you quickly become entrenched in the complex process of strategy development, execution and management. Very few businesses have the internal resources to support the labor intensive inbound marketing process. Typically those that do start out alone quickly become discouraged with their lackluster results. Anything worth doing is worth doing right—the same holds true for something as critical as an inbound program that’s going to create sustainable revenue for you.
