Are you witnessing lesser website visitors, lesser leads and lesser customers? Do you suffer from poor brand recognition and a low search engine ranking? Have you taken on the workload of inbound marketing by yourself?
Handling inbound marketing internally can get difficult and maintaining an efficient inbound marketing plan, that comprises of both the quality and quantity of content and conversation, requires a lot of hard work and is time consuming; hard work that can be invested into ideating, researching, writing, designing, optimizing, publishing, circulating, and social sharing.
Due to this huge commitment of time, money, and other resources, many businesses struggle with not just maintaining but also starting an effective inbound marketing plan. This results in companies giving up on inbound marketing as the challenges seem too daunting to them.
Inbound marketing works for virtually any business, be it B2B, B2C, products or services with no confinement of industry or audience. An effective inbound marketing plan has the ability to even increase sales. But not every company knows how to implement an effective in-house inbound marketing plan and in those cases outsourcing becomes your best option.
Benefits
Working with a great inbound marketing agency can be a blessing to your business as you will get to work hand-in-glove with veteran inbound marketing professionals at an inbound agency.
1. Better messaging as a result of better positioning
Marketing can work well if prospects get a clear picture as to the reason they should do business with you. An inbound marketing agency helps in determining market positioning and through this helps you in honing on the perfect type of messaging needed.
2. Better use of personalized content
When working with a top inbound marketing agency you will get to have an effect on more than the customers and it will give you a platform to give your opinion on topics that aid in positioning you as a thought leader instead of just another provider.
3. Better lead nurturing by focusing on the right goals
Each inbound marketing project has a different definition of success and once defined, it eases the process of measuring it and preparing it for different forecasted hurdles. In order to understand whether your overall marketing goals are being met, key metrics like conversion rates, subscribers, sales, media queries, referrals, downloads, and current engagement with new and existing customers need to be measured.
4. Better marketing workflow automation
Deciding what content needs to be produced and how to implement it is just the first step but it is vital that the different market segments that exist be understood so that a better appeal can be made to a larger group of prospects.
5. Better budget alignment to meet ROI goals
The budget that you can afford to spend on your marketing should be determined by your company’s goals, your competition, and what needs to be done to achieve those set goals and market supremacy.
Selection
Inbound marketing agencies come in a variety of shapes and sizes and with their individual talents and specialties. In order to differentiate a good agency from a bad one, you would need to recognize some core values and skill sets.
- The right services are offered – The marketing agency that you hire needs to be dealing with the inbound services that matter most to your business.
- The delivery process is clearly defined – The agency needs to have a robust, proven and logical plan of attack.
- The sales process is goal oriented – The agency’s pitch should be tailored to the specific goals and challenges of your business.
- An Inbound optimized website is maintained – The agency should be able to cite itself as a case study.
- Compelling testimonials are presented – The agency needs to have compelling examples of their prowess in inbound marketing.
- Focuses on specific niches – The agency shouldn’t be working in a generalized manner and should specialize in specific areas.
- Ability to teach and train your internal team – The agency should be able to and willing to leverage your internal team’s industry expertise.
- Key skills reside either in-house or with a trusted partner – The agency should be able to explain how it does what it does.
- Project management skills are strong – The agency should possess the capacity to run the entire inbound marketing production and implementation.
- Emphasizes measurements – The agency that measures all the key metrics, is able to succeed faster.
- Transparency is valued – The agency partner should be willing to showcase all the different aspects of the process that you wish to see.
Getting Started
An inbound marketing strategy can be utilized in all 3 stages of a buyer’s journey; the awareness stage, the consideration stage and the final stage of decision making. Through the use of a good inbound marketing, you can generate greatly targeted high-quality leads for your business’ online presence.
- An inbound marketing agency always starts the process by guiding you in the outlining of your ideal prospect. Once defined, targeting becomes much easier and way more effective.
- The agency then does a keyword research in order to understand what route your prospect takes to search for the work you do and the problems you solve.
- The agency then begins development of an ideal-buyer targeted content strategy for your website.
- They then ensure that your business is more visible to your ideal prospect in their search results.
- In order to aid in lead nurturing, the agency creates content that can be used as offering to prospects through automated email channels.
Conclusion
When you are falling short on time and manpower and key inbound tactics need to be implemented and executed, marketing agencies are there to help. As with any other agency partner, ensure that the agency you choose is a good strategic match for the kind of goals and challenges you have, along with your internal teams and processes.
Overall, it is more effective to hire an inbound marketing agency than to take on all tasks internally. For a number of years, by focusing on social media interaction, search engine optimization (SEO), blogging, keyword analysis, and responsible email care Inbound marketing agencies have been guiding businesses in the implementation of their inbound marketing strategy.
