Optimize 3.0 Inbound Marketing Blog

Your Guide to Inbound Marketing Services and Pricing

Posted by Doug Kirk  Jan 21, 2013 10:15:00 AM

What are inbound marketing services exactly and what do they cost? Inbound marketing is a broad undertaking that encompasses a range of activities.  When done correctly, in unison, it is perhaps the most effective means to drive new leads and sales to a website.  Actually inbound marketing pricingimplementing inbound marketing services goes well beyond simply buying automation marketing software.  Here’s why: The software only goes so far - be it Hubspot, Pardot, Maketo or any other platform.  Here's the disconnect - people often buy inbound marketing software without fully understanding the real effort required to fully benefit from the software investment. 

In order to understand both services and pricing of an inbound marketing effort below is a summary of each segment of an inbound campaign.  For pricing ranges and what you should expect to pay for each component download the full chart

Strategy/Assessment:  An initial series of meetings that understand the gaps/needs of your website.  This analysis should entail: a) Checking the current status of your site.  This includes visits, pageviews, conversions to leads and conversion to sales; b) On-page SEO for any mistakes or if needed at all; c) Structure of landing pages for best practice; d) Size and age of database; e) Presence of blog; f) Content assets. 

Technical Integration: What is needed to attach inbound marketing software to your website.   Sub domain structure for locating a blog and landing pages.  Or, do you want to migrate your site to a new content management system (CMS).  Hubspot has a really great, easy to use CMS.  

On-Page SEO:  Create or improve your on-page metadata.  Critical step to make sure your pages are recognized by Google.  This is a process of identifying targeted keywords for each and every page of your site and placing those keywords in places where Google and other search engines will find them. 

Content creation:  Comes in two flavors:  First, resources to blog at least once per week.  Understanding how to blog is critical as well.  There are specific ways to attract users to your blog and knowing what and how to write is paramount.  Second, and this cannot be overlooked, “premium content” creation is needed.  This is the content on your site with enough value so that visitors are willing o exchange contact information for access.  This can be a whitepaper, tip sheet or an infographic. 

Landing Pages: Special pages on your site that can capture lead information and integrate that data directly into your CRM.  This is where the inbound software can reall help building these pages in order to capture end user data.  A good inbound service provider can help integrate the auomated software and the CRM. 

Button creation: Compelling calls-to-action to provoke your users to download content from your site.  Important to test different variations of each button to derive the best click-throughs.

Lead nurturing:  The emails that follow after a visitor converts to a lead off your site.  These emails need to closely follow your sales cycle.  They move a lead further down the sales funnel and the interaction with these emails can provide your sales team another measure of purchase intent. 

Email:  Direct emails to your database with offers and content.  Needs to done at least once per month.   

Social Connectivity:  Integrating your social media accounts (FB, Twitter and Linkedin) into your inbound marketing plan.  Publishing your blog posts to groups and followers is the final step in any inbound marketing plan. 

So how much does this all cost?  We’ve built out an inbound marketing price chart for each component of a typical inbound marketing service engagement.   Pricing differences are often the result of the size of the providers.  Larger agencies are going to cost more with additional overhead but also offer a broader range of services.   Smaller agencies with less overhead may cost less and outsurce some work.  Download this inbound marketing services pricing chart to understand inbound marketing pricing to see what you can expect to pay for services.

 Inbound Marketing  Pricing Guide

 

Topics: inbound marketing, Online Marketing Essentials, Landing Pages, seo