Inbound marketing companies help you generate targeted high-quality leads for your business online. Inbound marketing leads find you. Traditional advertising is considered outbound because you are reaching out to find your leads.
So what kind of results does inbound marketing produce and how does the process work?
Inbound Marketing Results
Results will definitely vary by industry, but if you are a service business that charges your customers between $5,000-$20,000 per engagement, you will generally get 10-20 qualified leads per month with an effective inbound marketing strategy.
Getting Started With Inbound Marketing: Defining Ideal Prospects
A good Inbound marketing company will always start the process by helping you define your ideal prospects. Once you have your ideal prospects defined and you have identified what are the problems and questions that are unique to each prospect you make your targeting much easier and way more effective.
Once you have your ideal prospects and their needs and problems defined, your inbound marketing agency will dive into doing keyword research about how your prospects search for what you do and the problems that you solve for them.
Getting More Visible So Your Ideal Prospect Can Find You
After you understand how people search for you online, your inbound marketing agency should develop an ideal prospect targeted content plan for your website. This will include optimizing your existing website pages for better visibility in search plus a strategy for ongoing keyword targeted content generation.
Getting more visible for your ideal prospect in the search results is the first step of inbound marketing. Even inbound marketing is a numbers game. You have to be there when your ideal prospect is searching. Expanding your visibility in search puts you in front of more people. This is the top of your lead funnel.
Nurturing Your Leads To Understand When They’re Ready To Buy
All inbound marketing services should include some sort of strategy for nurturing leads so that you understand when your prospects are ready to buy. The best way to do this is through a marketing automation process that mirrors the buyer’s journey.
Your inbound marketing company should be creating content that can be offered to prospects via automated emails. When the prospect interacts with that content you can safely assume they are in that particular stage of their buyer’s journey.
Identifying when they are ready to buy is crucial to the inbound strategy. This is because when you try to sell before the buyer is ready to buy, they will push back and you will lose them.
There are three stages to the buyer’s journey that you can leverage with your inbound marketing strategy. The awareness stage is when your prospect is looking for answers and help. The consideration stage is when they are comparing vendors or solutions. The final stage is the decision stage. This is when the prospects are ready to buy.
Inbound Marketing Agency Reporting
What kind of reports should you expect from your inbound marketing agency? Reports are an important part of the process because you need to see what’s working so you can do more of it and what’s not working so you can do less of it.
You should be getting a full suite of reports from your inbound marketing agency. The reports should show you traffic to your website, we like to look at users and pageviews, over the past few months and also over the past 12 months. It’s important to be able to identify short-term and long-term trends.
You also want to see traffic by source. Sources of traffic include organic search, paid search, social and direct traffic. Again, you want to see these numbers over a 12 month period.
You should also be getting information on people who called you after finding the phone number on the website. This information can be helpful to show you how people are finding you. If you have a lot of people calling after they read a particular blog post you may want to create more content like that.
Keyword rankings should be tracked as well. This will show you which pages on your website are showing up in Google and at which positions. The total number of ranking and the quality of those rankings are both metrics to track.
Of course, the most important metric is leads. How many leads are you getting each month and why are they interacting with your website? This should be tracked month to month so you can evaluate your inbound marketing success.
If you have questions about what an inbound marketing company does please feel free to reach out (973) 770-4668.
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