More and more organisations are working with an inbound marketing agency to generate high-quality leads for their business – and for good reason.
In the past, many businesses were more than capable of surviving using offline marketing and advertising methods alone. However, those days are now gone. Today, in the digital age, it's imperative for modern businesses to strategically employ lead generation, utilizing inbound marketing services to engage potential customers authentically. Additionally, optimizing visibility on search engines has become crucial in establishing a strong online presence. These efforts collectively ensure not only attracting new leads but also effectively converting them into satisfied customers.
This means they need a robust website strategy, social media strategy, content marketing strategy, email strategy, landing page strategy, and much more besides.
Together, these strategies and more form the basis of an overarching inbound marketing strategy – a modern marketing approach that practically every business makes use of in some form today.
And since practically all businesses are competing in the online arena for the attention of potential customers in an increasingly crowded virtual marketplace, only the most effective and captivating inbound marketing efforts will make you stand out and bring your target audience into your sales funnel.
In other words, your inbound marketing strategy needs to be designed, executed, and measured professionally. For that, you need a professional inbound marketing agency.
Check out the following articles to learn more about inbound marketing:
- What Are the Five Fundamentals of Inbound Marketing?
- What Is B2B Inbound Marketing? The Complete 2023 Guide
- Top 5 problems inbound marketing solves for your business
What Type of Marketing Is Inbound Marketing?
In stark contrast to traditional and much more aggressive forms of outbound marketing such as cold calling, email blasts, direct mail, TV ads and radio ads – all of which seek to interrupt and intrude upon people with unsolicited messages – inbound marketing instead seeks to attract highly qualified customers towards the business like a magnet.
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Inbound marketing is known to be one of the most effective forms of marketing today. In fact, according to HubSpot’s latest State of Inbound Marketing report, companies that implement an inbound marketing strategy are four times more likely to rate their marketing strategy highly. In all, 81% of marketers who felt their company’s marketing strategy was effective rely on inbound marketing.
The reason is simple – while outbound marketing strategies take the sledgehammer approach, bombarding potential customers with unwanted ads, calls, and spam emails, inbound marketing strategies aim to attract and engage customers through the creation of targeted content and experiences specifically designed for them. This customer-centric approach, coupled with marketing automation, becomes a strategic means to efficiently deliver personalized content, ultimately aligning with and driving the achievement of specific business goals.
An inbound marketing agency aims to create campaigns that speak directly to the aspirations and needs of carefully qualified prospects and thereby draw them willingly into the sales funnel.
This is achieved via the inbound methodology, which, as HubSpot describes, consists of three parts:
- Attract strangers: Draw in the right people with valuable content and conversations that establish your business as a trusted advisor with whom they want to engage.
- Engage prospects: Present insights and solutions that align with their pain points and goals to increase the likelihood of buying from you rather than a competitor.
- Delight customers: Provide help and support in the post-purchase stage to empower your customers to find every success with their purchase.
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What Are Examples of Inbound Marketing?
Broadly, an inbound marketing agency will break down an inbound marketing strategy into ten components:
- Content marketing
- Social media marketing
- Search engine optimisation (SEO)
- Reporting and Attribution
- Email marketing
- Conversational marketing
- Account based marketing (ABM)
- Market and customer research
- International marketing
- Video marketing
Each requires its own strategy for design, execution, and ongoing optimisation. This is a lot of work for any in-house marketing team to handle on its own. In addition, in order to execute and measure the success of each strategy effectively, the business must invest in the right skills and software – meaning costs can quickly soar, even when just covering the basics.
By contrast, entrusting your digital marketing needs to a professional inbound marketing agency ensures that every strategy is meticulously crafted by dedicated experts with the skill and experience needed. These inbound marketing specialists, led by a seasoned marketing director, utilize their tools and expertise to not only meet but exceed your expectations. The focus is not just on executing strategies, but on leveraging them to effectively generate leads that align with your business goals – all achieved at an affordable rate. This collaborative approach allows you to concentrate on core business functions while the marketing director oversees the seamless integration of strategies for optimal results.
As such, the ten core components of inbound marketing give us our ten reasons you need to work with an inbound marketing agency.
Let’s take a look at each one at a time and consider their importance in a modern inbound marketing strategy.
10 Reasons You Need to Work with an Inbound Marketing Agency
1. You Need a Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing is the practice of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and ultimately drive profitable customer action.
Content marketing tactics include producing professionally-written web content, blog posts, eBooks, white papers, all of which serve to engage and educate prospective customers and draw them into your sales funnel.
Today, 82% of marketers report using content marketing, up from 70% last year.
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2. You Need a Social Media Marketing Strategy
Social media marketing aims to raise brand awareness, engage potential customers, and generate leads for your business via social media channels, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.
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Social media is the number 1 channel used in marketing right now, according to HubSpot’s report, with the most popular tactics including social listening, hashtags, and live video.
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3. You Need a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Strategy
One crucially important aspect of an inbound marketing strategy is SEO. It is SEO tactics that make your business discoverable in search, your website rank highly for keywords, and generate organic traffic from the web. A professional inbound marketing agency lives and breathes SEO – and has all the tools required to optimise your site for the best possible performance.
This is crucial, as the majority of marketers find that SEO and an optimised website help them achieve their marketing goals.
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4. You Need a Reporting an Attribution Strategy
Reporting is the first step in creating a personalised marketing experience for your potential customers. Demographic reports help you understand precisely who your audience is as a whole, so you can define your target buyer personas and thereby develop the perfect brand voice, tone, and content formats to execute a winning inbound marketing strategy.
Attribution is the next level. Attribution reporting allows you to discover the customer journey and turn it into a detailed, data-driven path that you can optimise at every turn.
While 72% of marketers say their company uses reporting tools, only 53% are using attribution reporting. An inbound marketing agency will help you develop robust attribution reporting and data analytics practices so you can optimise your marketing efforts with the customer at the centre.
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5. You Need an Email Marketing Strategy
Email marketing remains one of the strongest marketing strategies for businesses – but a successful strategy requires constant vigilance and optimisation, even when using email automation tools.
An inbound marketing agency won’t only help you devise conversion-driving emails and fantastic after-sale correspondence, but will conduct A/B testing and monitor results to ensure you get the best possible outcomes from your campaigns.
Today, marketers are sending fewer weekly emails than in the past, and instead prioritising segmentation, personalisation, and automation.
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6. You Need a Conversational Marketing Strategy
We live in a constantly connected world – and your customers expect to be able to reach you right around the clock and calendar. However, for most startups, it simply isn’t feasible to have customer service employees manning the phones and the live chat feeds 24/7/365 – which is why chatbots are becoming an increasingly valuable conversational marketing tool.
An inbound marketing agency will help you set up the optimum conversational marketing solution for your business to maximise conversation opportunities, so you won’t ever lose out on customers who are looking for information.
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7. You Need an Account Based Marketing (ABM) Strategy
If you’re looking to concentrate your marketing efforts on a small group of highly targeted accounts, you need an account based marketing or ABM strategy to complement your inbound marketing efforts.
ABM is a highly focussed growth strategy in which sales and marketing teams closely align to create extremely personalised experiences for a mutually identified set of high-value accounts. Like inbound marketing, ABM is content heavy – and requires the skills and resources of an expert inbound marketing agency to execute effectively.
70% of marketers now use ABM strategies, utilising a wide range of tools – though a number of challenges remain which an inbound agency will help you overcome.
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8. You Need a Market and Customer Research Strategy
In order to grow your business, you need to conduct regular market and customer research. We emphasise the word regular because, in today’s fast-paced world of continuous digital evolution, any benchmarks, data, and statistics you’re working with from three years, two years, or even just six months ago may as well be from the 1990s.
An inbound marketing agency will provide you with the tools and skills required to gather and synthesise up-to-the-minute information so you can optimise your campaigns in line with your customers’ needs today – not yesterday.
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9. You Need an International Marketing Strategy
93% of respondents to HubSpot’s State of Inbound Marketing survey operate in more than one region – yet only 65% report marketing internationally.
Launching an international marketing strategy is no mean feat – especially if you need to promote your business and products in multiple languages.
Working with an expert inbound marketing agency can help you overcome these challenges and enable you to thrive in promising markets around the world.
(Image source: hubspot.com)
10. You Need a Video Marketing Strategy
Even as the world of marketing continuously changes, one thing remains constant – the high demand for video content.
Video continues to be an essential tool that marketers leverage across numerous channels – from website webinars to Facebook, Instagram and YouTube – to connect with the potential and existing customers.
(Image source: hubspot.com)
Final Thoughts – How to Choose an Inbound Marketing Agency
In 2022 and beyond, it’s crucial to truly consider what it means to be successful at inbound digital marketing.
When selecting an inbound marketing agency, you need to ensure that the provider you choose has the full capabilities to deliver on every single strategy outlined above, and can provide you with a full team of content creators, SEO experts, designers, and innovative thinkers on tap to expand your business.
Get in touch with leading inbound marketing agency Incisive Edge today to learn more about how we can assist you.
