Inbound Marketing Costs: What You Need to Know

It can be really difficult for companies to know what to pay for an inbound marketing campaign. There are many different strategies to pursue an inbound marketing strategy, with various levels of intensity. Determining a budget depends on your customer demographic, business size, and metrics like lifetime customer values or average order size.

The Basics of Inbound Marketing Pricing Structures:

Start with Content

The core of inbound marketing is build around providing valuable content to your potential customers, and drawing them in through that value rather than interrupting their lives with your outbound marketing messages. The cost of producing this content depends on how frequently you want to share new content, how much of the content you are able to produce in-house, and what kind of content you need to produce. A monthly plan can run anywhere from a few hundred dollars for the writing and management of a monthly blog, to several thousand for high volume or extensive content development. Determining the right amount depends on your customer’s needs and your businesses’ goals.

• Summary: $200 to $3,000+ per month depending type and volume of content needed

Become Discoverable

Once the content is created, the rest of the inbound marketing campaign will make that content discoverable. Search engine optimization, email marketing, social media and more are usually leveraged for the distribution of content. This pricing for these services ranges again on the approach and strategy of your business. A monthly newsletter might just cost an hour or two of work, but sending daily emails is a different story. Same with social media posting. SEO usually starts around $500 per month for a basic, localized project and can run into the thousands for national campaigns or highly competitive keywords.

• Summary: $750 to $5,000+ per month depending on frequency and intensity of campaign

Inbound marketing is driven by how discoverable you want your content to be — meaning this piece determines a good portion of your inbound marketing costs.

Generate Leads

Often a lead generation tool, such as a whitepaper or other PDF download, is created and offered to potential customers in exchange for their contact info. This formally captures them as a lead. It can take between 5-20 hours to create this content and usually 2-10 hours to create a landing page depending on how detailed you want to get.

• Summary: 10 – 30 hours of work per campaign & target market; one-time expense

Automate Your Efforts

Lastly, marketing automation software is pretty essential to the inbound process. We are Hubspot partners and have enjoyed using their software end-to-end. The keyword research tool enables us to find organic search opportunities, the blog and landing page platform makes it easy for us to generate leads, and email automation means we can engage with prospects in our sleep. With the analytics integration, everything is kept at high level so we simply know what’s working and what needs improvement. An automation software like Hubspot isn’t essential to an inbound marketing campaign for smaller businesses, but is a big cost and headache-saver for businesses that want to inbound marketing right over the long run. The software as a standalone cost can be a bit pricy ($400+ per month), but if well-integrated into the rest of the campaign, is easily worth it.

• $400 to $1,000+ per month depending on traffic, lead and customer volumes

Is It Working?

The key with inbound marketing pricing is to understand it’s all about value-based pricing. Because the whole system is built to attract and nurture leads, you will have a good idea after just a few months at the direction and ROI your strategy is delivering. Inbound works best for B2B businesses with high customer values or B2C businesses with a strong following and e-commerce setup. However, basic inbound marketing principles and strategies apply to every single business. It’s easier to evaluate than other marketing tactics, and saves your business time on the front end dealing with unqualified leads.

Tying It All Together:

At the end of the day, the philosophy of inbound marketing is simple. Produce great content so customers come to you when they need you (meaning they are pre-qualified) rather than trying to always drive your message or product into their busy lives. This is done by creating great content, but also making that content discoverable through organic search, social media, and other forms of digital marketing. With an inbound campaign, most of the cost comes in creating the content, so each service you choose to support that effort comes at a nice discount. For example, we lower the cost of SEO, social media, e-newsletters and more when there is a content strategy in place, because we don’t have to create additional content for each of those services.

Overall, a good inbound campaign will usually start at a $1500 monthly retainer on the low end, and can approach $10,000+ on the high end. If you know your customer acquisition costs and conversion rates, you will be able to build a good strategy and set the right the budget for your business. Looking to get started? Contact us and we’ll discuss your options.

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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.

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Inbound Marketing for B2B Companies

The B2B world is often very familiar with bigger invoices and a more considered buying process. These principles make the industry a great fit for Inbound marketing. Inbound marketing for B2B companies offers many benefits over outbound marketing strategies, including the three highlighted in this article.

High-priced purchases are well researched, giving your business an opportunity to shine with good content.

Most of the B2B businesses are in the high price product/service spectrum, where buyers usually do a bit of homework before investing their money. For instance, if you were selling industrial products the business looking to purchase these products would consider all the specifications of your products. They would research to understand the features of your product, your asking price and your warranty. A well-strategized inbound campaign would help you increase your online visibility and improve your odds of being found when potential customers are carrying out product research before buying them. If a potential customer finds your site first after an online search, they will instantly connect your brand with trust and thought leadership. Offering them a content piece as a free download in exchange for their basic contact information is a good way to start moving them along the Inbound marketing sales funnel.

B2B purchasing decisions are generally more considered, meaning it’s less likely you will interrupt someone to close a deal on a whim, and more common that you’ll win a good lead by attracting interest with great content.

Engage pre-qualified leads with strategic content marketing.

Inbound marketing is all about having your customers find you, rather than the other way around. This is accomplished by creating valuable content that is then distributed through social media and discovered through online search. If done right, you are able to build your content strategy around the unique product or service your business offers. With Inbound marketing, every lead is pre-qualified in a sense, as they found you based on what your business can do for them. Make sure you leverage this strategy to tell your authentic brand story, and you’ll see conversion rates soar.

Improves Trust & Credibility

Marketing is as much about delivering the right message as it is about understanding the psychology of the target audience. Outbound marketing has lost its credibility as you are usually trying to push a product or a service that the customer may not be interested in. On the other hand, Inbound marketing is driven by the buyer. They would visit your page or social media accounts because they have chosen to do so and haven’t been forced to listen to your marketing pitch. They are equally as enthusiastic about your products or services as you are about selling it to them. Through this process, Inbound marketing improves trust and credibility for any B2B business. This is why we believe Inbound marketing for B2B companies can be so effective!

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What is Inbound Marketing?

You may have heard or read about the importance of Inbound marketing to promote your business. Inbound marketing principles are built on the idea of your customers finding you, rather than the other way around. Here is a breakdown of inbound marketing from an inbound marketing specialist where we take a look at the four important stages in this marketing technique.

• Appeal – This is the first and the most important stage for an inbound marketing campaign. This is all about catching the attention of absolute strangers who are actively looking for the products or services you offer. You can use your website, blog, or social media handles to offer them what they are looking for in the form of whitepapers, blog posts, or other forms of content. To maximize the impact, you need to align your content strategy and search engine optimization strategy with the search habits of your customers. The goal here is to turn this Stranger into your regular Visitor.

The goal of inbound marketing is to attract customers when they are looking for you, not constantly interrupting them with your advertising.

• Convert – Once you have a targeted Visitor, the goal is now to capture them as a Lead. Your visitor may have landed on your site looking for your product or service, but he or she may not be interested in buying it immediately. How do you ensure that he or she is converted into lead? Incorporate a landing page strategy into your website where visitors can exchange their name, phone, and email address in exchange for a piece of content that will be interesting to them. If your business sells sporting equipment, you might offer a downloadable PDF that highlights new sporting equipment trends. This gives the visitor a piece of content they are interested in, and your business now has a lead to begin nurturing.

• Sell – This is the action stage of an inbound marketing campaign where you convert the Lead into a sale or turn the individual into your Customer. This is where your sales process needs to kick into full gear. For higher value purchases and/or more considered buying processes, a personal contact should be made within 24-48 hours of getting a new lead. Otherwise, an automated marketing strategy should be in place to nurture leads through the sales process. Follow up emails, social media connection and other strategies all work towards turning a lead into a happy customer.

• Gratify – This is the last stage of an inbound marketing campaign. The idea in this stage of the process is to continue adding value to your customer in order to turn them into an evangelist or Promoter. Adding this high level of value will bring your business into the conversations your customer is having with others. You need to consistently engage with them though social media, and don’t forget to reward their loyalty with better deals so that they come back to you in the future (along with their friends and family).

Working with Inbound Marketing Specialist

Inbound marketing is fast-growing movement, and many B2B and online B2C companies are a great fit for these strategies. Contact us if you are curious about whether or not an inbound strategy can work for your business. We have helped clients with Inbound marketing in Portland, OR and beyond.

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