Why Does Inbound Marketing Cost So Much?

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So you’ve looked around, you’ve talked to your friends and colleagues who own businesses, and you’ve come to the conclusion that Inbound Marketing — whatever that is — is the way to go. You know that performing well in search engine rankings is important, and you know you need to be doing more with social media… but quite frankly, it’s all a bit overwhelming! You’re not sure where to start, so you call a digital marketing agency like Waypost Marketing and ask some questions… What’s this all about? How do all the pieces fit together? How much can I expect to pay for something like this?

Whoa. You’re hit with sticker shock!

Why should it cost hundreds, even thousands of dollars a month to have a company write a few blog articles and post a few Tweets for you?

What Am I Getting For My Inbound Marketing Budget?

In order to help you understand why the sticker price is higher than you might have been expecting, let me break down for you what all we actually do.

Keyword Research

When doing keyword research, I look at it from a lot of different angles. These include:

• What do you [the client] consider important keywords for your industry? This should be obvious, but we know that you have a good idea of what keywords are relevant to your business. After all, you know your business better than we do. Especially in the beginning, we are probably going to rely on you to educate us on the language used in your industry.
• What keywords will people actually use when searching for your products or services? We will ask you some questions about this, but we will also do some independent research. If a user isn’t familiar with what you do, they’re not going to be looking for you the way you might think. This is where we figure out what they’re typing in to try to get to you.
• What are the top-searched keywords and keyword phrases?
• What are the top converting keywords and keyword phrases? In other words, which keywords are the ones that get people through your sales funnel and out the other side?

Funnel Analysis

This is where I sit down with your website and take a look at it through the eyes of the uninitiated. I’m putting myself in the mindset of someone who needs your services and looking at things like:

• How is the information laid out?
• What are the questions that I have? Can I find answers to those questions quickly and easily?
• What is the purpose of each page?
• What am I supposed to do at the end of each page?
• How do I get in touch with you?
• How much commitment is involved if I click ‘submit’ on your contact form? Am I locked into dealing with a smarmy sales guy? Am I obligated to give you a lot more information? What can I expect after I give you my information?

Persona Development

At this point, I’m figuring out who we will be talking to when we write your content. What is their demographic information? How do they get their news? What are they like? This involves a lot of research because we need to be as specific as possible. By the end of this stage, we want to have a storyline written for each persona your business has.

Content Creation

We spend hours researching, writing, and editing each piece of content we create, as well as selecting appropriate images, and formatting them. A good blog post can run anywhere from 2-6 hours, depending on depth and technicality of subject, and it should! We spend this time making sure that our posts are fresh, original, engaging, educating, and compelling, and we do not take this responsibility lightly.

Distribution, Promotion, and Engagement

Once your blog posts are created, we then have to distribute them, promote them, and often engage with your audience. This takes time, and leads to…

Reviewing, Reporting, and Regrouping

We spend time monitoring the performance of your posts, emails, social media activity, and so on. We analyze our data and create reports to send to you in order to keep you apprised of your progress. If a piece isn’t performing like we think it should be, we will sit down as a team and take a look at possible causes and develop new strategies to use going forward.

What this all boils down to is that inbound marketing takes a lot of time. At Waypost Marketing, we put many, many hours of work into each level of each client’s inbound marketing plan, from development to implementation to review. We invest a lot — you should too!

If you’re still thinking that all of this sounds like too much work, maybe you want to consider what a website visitor is worth to you. The importance of Inbound Marketing isn’t that we spend so much time posting to Facebook — it’s that every visitor is a potential lead, and we know how to get those potential leads to you. For more information, check out our free e-book, “25 Website Must-Haves for Driving Traffic, Leads, & Sales” or just give us a call at (864) 288-6162.