Thinking about jumping onboard the “inbound marketing” train? Maybe you downloaded a Hubspot e-book or attended a Marketo webinar? You heard story after story of more leads, increased sales, better converting sites and increased traffic. It looked pretty cool, so you thought you’d check it out.
So what’s it gonna cost to do inbound marketing well? Here is what we’ve found to be the cost of inbound marketing entry for our clients at Philly Marketing Labs. There are three questions you need to ask yourself to understand the true cost before getting to implementation costs (question #4).
1) Are you committed to more business?
You’re probably thinking, “Duh.” Right?
Well consider the implications of more business. If you increased your business by 50%, could you deliver tomorrow? If not, how long would it really take you to ramp up?
Inbound marketing works. If you invest in it, you’d better be committed to growing your business with more workers, technology, office space, trucks, whatever it means to grow your business. Otherwise, you’re just lighting a fuel tank without building the rocket. Not a good image.
Add investing in capacity to your costs.
2) Are you willing to invest in strategy?
Inbound marketing requires some serious strategy. You’ll create powerful personas that reflect the essence of your buying audience. You’ll step through the buyer’s journey to really understand how the sale comes into the mind of your ideal customer – and how it solidifies into a buying decision. You review your information architecture to ensure your website flows to meet your visitors needs. You’ll also develop a powerful content strategy that will feed the hungry inbound marketing engine that will be your Web footprint.
You must invest in trained professionals to guide you through this. Otherwise, you’ll be wasting your time and money on bells and whistles that won’t generate results.
3) Can you create the regular and compelling content required by the inbound content monster?
No one knows this space like you do. Effective inbound marketing is built on top of heavy content like blog posts, web pages, webinars, e-books, videos, whitepapers, etc. The conversion architecture (landing pages, calls to action, etc.) is overlaid on top of your content. No content, no conversions.
You need someone who can crank out at least two good blog posts each month. Bare minimum. There is a lot of proven upside if you can generate more. According to Hubspot, there are 55% more Website visitors for companies that blog. Oh yeah, all of your social channels use this content to converse about your industry as well.
Allow for one day per week for an experienced writer, at least.
4) Inbound marketing services & Hubspot.
Oh! Is this why you clicked on this post to begin with? The hard cost answers are much easier – and relatively less costly investments. You can find Hubspot Pricing here. There are also some excellent inbound marketing companies that publish their pricing.
For $7900, one firm provides 35 hours/month of B2B marketing and lead generation services.
Another firm charges $5,000/month for content marketing (outsourcing point #3 above) plus $2,500 per month for demand generation or $4,500/month for marketing automation. Aggressive growth plans can be 40% more.
Philly Marketing Labs is not a one-size-fits-all firm. We understand that you have resources, constraints and considerations that might play into the monthly pricing.
If you’d like to talk about your unique situation, we’ll be happy to provide a quote for your custom inbound marketing prescription.
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