Inbound Marketing Pricing and Strategy
Inbound marketing is an integral part of business strategy for any company engaging in digital marketing tactics. Inbound techniques offer s a great way to pull your customers in without advertising, instead leveraging strong content marketing to make your business discoverable through online search. The best part about inbound marketing is that customers come to your website as pre-qualified leads, as they found your business after searching online for a solution to one or more of their existing pain points.
The pricing of inbound marketing depends on a handful of various factors. For example, the more content you produce, the more reach you target over social media, and more SEO strategies you deploy will all drive up the cost of your campaign. Many times digital marketing companies will create inbound marketing packages built around the various efficiencies a company can enjoy by investing in certain levels of inbound marketing. For example, investing heavily in social media promotion without investing in a similar amount of content creation will leave your social media accounts lacking fresh, valuable collateral to share with your audience, limiting your ROI.
To build your ideal budget, you need to answer some basic questions:
- How long are you willing to wait before you see the results you want?
- What is the lifetime value of new customers? (To determine overall ROI)
- What’s the effort required (or cost if hiring out) to produce the needed content?
- Will you need to invest in scaling expenses when your business starts to grow from inbound?
Different Inbound Marketing Packages
The Basics
A basic inbound marketing campaign might consist of weekly blog posts paired with a basic search engine optimization campaign. A monthly newsletter highlighting the blog posts, and weekly social media sharing of your blog content can hit all cylinders of a good inbound campaign and can keep your pricing around the $1,000 / month range.
Mid-Range
Most businesses will want to at least consider at mid-level campaign to get the most bang for their buck with their inbound marketing efforts. A campaign like this might feature 1-3 blog posts per week with a social media schedule built around the content schedule. A company may want to invest additional paid marketing dollars into the social media posts to gain greater exposure. A strong SEO campaign along with weekly email marketing efforts to segmented lists will position a business for inbound success. The range for a campaign like this can run anywhere from $1500 to $7,500, largely depending upon the quality and quantity of created content and the amount of paid advertising invested to support the campaign. Programs in this price range will also likely benefit from leveraging marketing automation software to more efficiently execute their inbound plan.
Your inbound marketing budget will largely be determined by the amount of content you are producing for your customers and leads.
Full Speed
An all-out inbound campaign can run anywhere from $7,500 to $15,000+. It will involve 15-30 blog posts per month paired with an equally-aggressive social media to promote the content. Businesses suited for this kind of production and marketing either already have large audiences or are in a fast-growing start up phase. In both cases, their content may have a short shelf-life due to their particular industry, meaning consistent production is key (news & entertainment sites, fashion blogs, etc.). While independent SEO efforts may not need to be ramped up that much due to the level of content being produced already, a good SEO strategy should still be considered. However, more of the cost may lie around strategy and keyword research rather than just backlink building. Finally, companies engaging in campaigns as this level are often sending daily emails to countless segmented lists representing many different buyer personas and/or stages of the sales funnel. At this level, a robust marketing automation software is a must or else this degree of inbound marketing is next to impossible to deliver properly.
