When growing a company, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with every aspect of your business. However as a CEO, the greatest assets you bring to the organization are your visionary insights, forward, innovative thinking and, of course, revenue growth strategies. The same holds true for your CMO and VP of Sales and Marketing. Their role is to develop the best strategy for obtaining the organizational goals associated with profitability. Unfortunately, they too easily get off track and lost in tactical execution. That’s why it’s important to find strategic partners to help your leadership team focus on high-level strategic execution and oversight—especially when it comes to inbound marketing and sales.
2 Key Inbound Considerations
Considering that fact that inbound marketing is really less than ten years old, it’s easy to understand why inbound marketing can be overwhelming when it comes to strategy development and execution—there simply are not a lot of strategic experts that are proficient at implementing an inbound program that generates results.
In addition, there are two constants today that are consistently changing:
(1) Buyer’s online journey
(2) Internet algorithms
Inbound marketing is an evolving field and things change all the time. It’s critical to stay on top of the changes to achieve the results from your inbound investment. Do you know what to monitor to stay on top of these industry trends?
Inbound Marketing Requires Dedication
One thing we find again and again with organizations is their lack of understanding exactly how labor intensive managing an inbound program actually is. In addition, not everyone understands the difference between the strategic side vs. the tactical side of an inbound program—they are two very different critical components. From strategy elements such as goal setting and measurement, to personas, content frequency, type, channels and campaigns, to tactical execution of search engine optimization, posting, publishing, content creation, conversions, measurement, analysis and more, to get results to justify your investment requires time, realistic expectations and expertise. Does your staff have both the time and comprehensive expertise to execute an inbound program?
Specialized Resources
Just like every other aspect of your business, you have invested in either specialized tools and systems as well as professional expertise to facilitate productivity and efficiency—resources for managing an inbound marketing program is no exception.
Do you have an interactive design team–writers and editors that can create professional content, web pages and landing pages that converts visitors to leads? To get results, you need designers and developers that understand the art and science of conversion-centered content and design. You need digital strategist that understand how to interpret data into meaningful executable strategy.
Are you spending a lot of time piecemealing tools and systems together, and yet still don’t have accurate analytics to make good decisions? Or is it taking more time to actually do the tactical work because of multiple inefficient systems? Ensuring that the right automated marketing systems are in place and are fully integrated into your CRM is imperative for a seamless marketing and sales system to effectively work.
9 Inbound Partner Readiness Considerations
Not sure if you’re ready for an inbound marketing partner? Here’s a list of the circumstances where hiring an inbound agency will be a cost-effective approach. You don’t need all of these conditions to appear, but if you’ve got three or more of them, bring in the experts:
(1) You need to show desired results very quickly
(2) You’ve got limited staff capacity
(3) Your staff has minimal inbound marketing knowledge and skills
(4) You don’t have the bandwidth to make content creation a top focus
(5) Pay-per-click (PPC) is a) costing more every day to achieve the same quantity of leads, or b) having a lower close rate compared to other sources, and you lack the expertise in-house to figure out how to tweak your PPC efforts any further
(6) You have limited experience using A/B testing to optimize lead generation campaigns to increase ROI
(7) You lack analytics expertise to derive insights from data to inform optimization efforts
(8) You need help setting up best practice systems, processes, and policies for implementing inbound marketing
(9) You understand the need to have progressive changes made to your website in order to facilitate inbound marketing, yet you have no in-house expertise
Benefit from Inbound Marketing Partners
When you partner with an inbound marketing agency that is proven to generate results to either support some or your entire inbound marketing program, you’ll benefit from:
- Dedicated professionals who consistently practice inbound marketing methodology as their core area of expertise and monitor industry trends continually
- Writers who have been specially trained in the area of inbound content conversions, SEO and brand messaging across all digital channels
- Inbound digital strategists who use automated marketing systems to their fullest extent to get the right message to the right people at the right time, consistently, as well as analyze data for ongoing strategy conversion optimization
- A team dedicated to your inbound marketing program that is relentless in their pursuit of reaching your goals and supporting your efforts to grow your business.
With a results-oriented partner onboard, your marketing and sales teams can focus on what they do best, while benefitting from more traffic, more leads and higher sales qualified conversions.
Quick Take Aways
Is your inbound marketing program generating enough traffic and converting high quality leads? How are your search engine rankings? Does your company have the capacity to have an entire team of inbound experts in-house to develop a strategy and execute and manage the program? Frankly you’re not alone—most companies don’t go it alone when it comes to a true inbound methodology.
Maintaining a results-oriented inbound marketing program that includes both the quality and quantity of content necessary to see results requires hard work. If you’re doing it right, it is time consuming and never ending. Just like every other aspect of your business requires focus, so does your marketing.
