I’m gonna start this post off with a slightly negative admission, so please–bear with me.
Inbound marketing can very often feel like a black hole.
When you invest in pay-per-click advertising or Facebook ads, you see the results immediately; your traffic goes up from day 1.
With inbound, a client writes a check every month for a strategy–and daily execution of that strategy–but for the first 3, 4, 5 long months, they get very little back in their pocket in terms of satisfying metrics.
Now, we warned you about this trend. We explained why inbound marketing efforts don’t show you immediate results, why the first few months would be slow, that you’ll put a lot in and get very little back at first.
But we also told you that it would pay off when you wait a little longer, and now it’s time to see just how–and how much.
See, it might take you a longer time to see the results of an inbound approach, but when you do, they cost a whole lot less over time than utilizing outbound techniques.
How much less? Well, according to a research gathered by HubSpot:
- Companies save an average of $20K by investing more in inbound over outbound tactics
- Content marketing generates 3 times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing, but costs 62% less
- Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost
So inbound isn’t just an effective approach because of the strong, long-term relationship it allows you to build with your prospects. It’s also the most cost-effective approach to generating leads and converting customers.
Numbers are great, but you might be asking yourself why this is the case. What makes inbound leads cost less over time?
Well ask, and you shall receive.
1) Optimized Traffic
The main reason that you see a greater ROI (return on investment) with inbound marketing efforts is because the traffic that’s coming to your website is targeted and primed to engage with your site. More quality leads means more people who are at a stage where they’re willing and ready to convert.
We’ve seen this firsthand. One of our clients recently expressed surprise that his site was generating pretty much the same traffic at the same point last year (just 4 months into the engagement). In other words, no major traffic boost, no generation of millions more visitors. But despite the stagnant number of visitors, his revenue had increased by 70% directly from the inbound marketing efforts we implemented on his behalf.
Now, we weren’t surprised at all, because while the amount of traffic was the same, the quality of that traffic was far improved. The conversion of leads on the site had skyrocketed due to the optimization of the site and the premium offers now prominently displayed. We had been pulling out the right leads, talking to the right people, encouraging the right prospects to visit and engage with the site. In this case, they were there the whole time, they just needed to be engaged. And in turn, they became customers.
This is what your inbound efforts are all about. All of the content you put out, the relevant articles meant to attract the attention of your defined buyer personas–all of that is sending a clear message of who you’re after and what they can expect from you. The result? A higher number of engaged, quality leads.
And it’s important to note that you’re generating these quality leads at a much lower marketing cost. Many of the paid components of marketing just send traffic–not leads. If your content game is on point, and you’re best utilizing the the lead generation and marketing automation tools at your disposal, you’ll generate significantly stronger prospects without needing to shell out a dime for paid ads.
Bottom line: inbound marketing ensures that the time and effort you’ve put into your marketing campaign has been spent on the right people–the quality leads that will pay off in return.
2) Optimized Output
Another reason why inbound marketing leads ultimately cost less for your company is because of what you’re producing through your inbound efforts.
Everything you’ve created from day one of your inbound campaign will live on as long as the internet does. And further, all of the pieces continue to build on top of one another, creating an intricate web of enduring results.
So take a paid Facebook ad. That’s gone when you turn it off, and it shuts down any consumer engagement that came from it. The ad may have generated 3,000 visits to your website on day 1, but on day 2 you’ll need to pay for another 3,000 visits.
But take the core of inbound marketing: content. That lives on forever. If you wrote an article in April, you can share it again in December. Maybe it didn’t resonate with a lead the first time they saw it, but maybe because of the season or where they are in the buyer’s journey, it does the second time. Further, that content can be repurposed and repackaged into other opportunities for attracting and engaging your prospects.
We like to think of it as compound marketing. Each and every month of your inbound marketing engagement, the efforts are building on top of the previous month’s efforts, so that in month #3, you have 3X the amount of effort and product, rather than just what’s being created in the current month.
So the efforts you put into creating content and the other pieces of the inbound puzzle pay off big time when you realize that they’re never going away. You’ve ensured a lifetime warranty on some of the biggest projects you’ve invested in, and that is priceless.
3) Optimized Sales Team
There’s one statistic we left off of our earlier breakdown into why inbound leads cost less:
Companies that excel at lead nurturing have 9% more sales reps making quota.
In other words, inbound marketing makes your sales team a lot more efficient and effective. It allows them to close a lot more sales and faster.
There’s several reasons why. The first goes back to the importance of generating quality leads. If we’re only sending the sales team strong, quality prospects that are already primed to purchase, then it will be much easier for the sales team to push them through that last bit of the funnel and turn them into customers. Further, the content you’ve been creating also helps them close, as they have a ton of valuable information at their fingertips that can answer any customer’s last minute questions or objections
The sales team is also able to achieve all of this faster because of marketing automation. It could take about 3-6 months for a prospect to become a warm lead, depending on the sales cycle. It falls to the sales team to follow up with that prospect every so often, let’s say every 3 weeks, to nurture the prospect and move them closer to sale. But automated workflows can keep in touch instead, educating them, keeping them moving until they’re a warm lead. Only then does the salesperson need to get involved, thus freeing them up to only focus on hot leads–not cold prospects.
(If you’re curious about more benefits that inbound marketing brings to your sales team, we’ve got you covered.)
While it’s true that the slow-burn inbound approach means your ROI might not really register until month 6, it will be greater than it would be with traditional, outbound methods. The time, money, and efforts that you invested will generate quality leads that are primed to close, which will in turn allow the sales team to close more of them. Further, those efforts will continue to live on after the initial work you’ve put into producing them, which means they’ll continue to generate quality leads, starting the circle over.
So you’ll get the return on investment you’re after. In fact, you’ll get a greater one than you could have anticipated. You just need to give it some time.