How to Bring Inbound Marketing In-House
Businesses today are increasingly adopting inbound marketing as their primary strategy for finding better prospects. Using highly-personalized messages to engage customers not only results in increased sales and greater brand recognition, but it also delivers better results than traditional outbound methods. Research shows that inbound leads cost 61% less than outbound leads. Even better–the average cost per lead drops by 80% within the first few months of consistent inbound marketing efforts.
But now the big decision for most businesses is whether they should do inbound marketing in-house or hire an agency to execute their inbound marketing campaigns.
Let’s dive into both these options and explore what offers more significant value.
Understanding Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing uses the power of quality content to attract visitors to your website. These visitors can turn into leads and, ultimately, happy customers.
Inbound marketing content includes videos, blogs, articles, eBooks, white papers, and much more, which educate and inform prospects while demonstrating that you offer the best solution to their problem.
In other words, inbound marketing isn’t hard-selling. Instead, it is less intrusive and revolves around winning over your prospect’s heart, mind, and trust, and eventually, their business. It’s about providing them with the resources and information they need to make the decisions that are best for them, and showing them exactly why their solution includes you.
When people hear about inbound marketing or content, blogging usually comes to mind. Businesses that blog are 13 times more likely to experience a positive ROI, all thanks to their inbound marketing efforts. But inbound marketing isn’t just about blogging. It does play an essential part in your strategy, but it is only one part of an incredibly powerful approach to selling your products and services.
Other components of a typical inbound marketing strategy include:
- Video
- Landing pages
- Forms
- Social media
- Blogging
- Calls-to-action buttons
- Premium downloads (eBooks, white papers, case studies, etc.)
- Online advertising
These tools help marketers adapt to the new consumer-powered marketing landscape. So should these be deployed using an in-house team, or is partnering with an agency a better idea?
Do You Have What It Takes To Conquer Inbound Marketing Technology?
For starters, you’ll need a full-blown marketing team to create and execute inbound marketing campaigns. If your team members have previous experience as well as the tactical know-how required to deploy all of your inbound marketing assets with ease, it might make sense to do it yourself.
However, that’s not likely. If you are planning on hiring for all the relevant roles, know that it will be exponentially more expensive than budgeting for an agency to do the work.
Also, consider the fact that inbound agencies have one sole purpose, and that is to ramp up your traffic, leads, and revenue. Your agency partners can do all of that independently (no guidance needed) and will double down on content production to speed up the results as necessary.
Answer the following questions to help gauge your in-house inbound marketing capabilities and determine the right move for you and your goals:
Do You Have Clear And Realistic Goals For Inbound Campaigns?
If you want to aggressively grow your revenue by 25% or more within a short period, it might be a good idea to leave it to the experts at the agency.
On the other hand, more conservative goals can be achieved in-house, as long as you have a marketing team that understands how to cater to your audience using the right strategies.
Do You Have The Resources To Meet Those Goals?
Now that you know your goals, you’ll need to determine if your staff is capable of meeting them.
Understand that you will need not only marketers but also designers, social media experts, community managers, developers, and content writers. Your team might not be able to live up to the expectations and requirements of a successful inbound marketing campaign.
An agency knows what they’re doing, how to do it, and has the available people and resources to make it happen.
Do You Have The Marketing Budget To Hire For The Roles?
If you still want to execute your campaign in-house, but your team is lacking expertise, consider how much you would be willing to invest to reach your marketing goals.
For example, a marketing director alone might require a base salary upwards of $70,000. And that doesn’t include a supporting team to execute all of the additional campaign functions.
The real question is: Would you be willing to spend more on hiring and retaining employees than what you’d have to pay an agency that already has the skills, expertise, and resources on-hand? Keep in mind the fact that people at the agency are already trained and have considerable experience in creating, implementing, executing, and measuring inbound campaigns, translating to better ROI a lot faster. They also come with the agility and know-how to switch gears to ensure optimal campaign performance.
The Last Word
An outside agency can provide you with a more holistic view of your marketing. They can accurately pinpoint weaknesses and play to your strengths, set goals, define problems, offer agility to change up the course when needed, and develop a solid strategy that delivers in the ways that it’s supposed to. Ready to get started with a strategic marketing campaign that slamdunks your goals? Let the experts at C-leveled help. Contact us today, and let’s talk.
