Typically, Inbound Content Marketing is a good fit when at least one of these three things are in play:
You Have High Revenue and/or Volume
Your company has enough revenue and/or volume to profitably support an Inbound Marketing approach
You Have a High Average Sale and/or LTV
Your average sale and/or lifetime customer value (LTV) is high enough to profitably support an Inbound Marketing approach
You Have a Long or Complex Sales Cycle
Your sales cycle & processes are long or complex enough that the sales/marketing synergies created offset the cost of the approach
Revenue/Volume
Does your company have enough revenue and/or volume to support an inbound marketing approach?
There are a lot of moving parts when implementing an inbound approach and content production takes time & resources. In other words, it’s not inexpensive to do and that’s true whether you work with a team like ours or implement a program in-house. There’s no hard number you need to be over, but typically, once an organization is doing somewhere in the $3-5 million range (or a reasonable path to get there in the case of a start-up), they can more easily absorb the costs of implementing and running an inbound program.
Does that mean you have to be at $3 million/year to justify inbound marketing? Nope, and we’ll explore that more below, but when you hit that somewhat arbitrary threshold, you likely have a reasonable marketing budget already. At that point, it’s very likely that pivoting to an inbound marketing approach will simply produce better results with a stronger ROI than what you’re doing now.
Average Sale/LTV
Does your company have a high average sale or lifetime customer value (LTV) to support Inbound Marketing?
If we had to choose one qualifier, this would be it. The more revenue a potential customer brings in – upfront, over the course of your relationship with that customer, or both – justifying the expense of an inbound intiative becomes a whole lot easier.
Customer Acquisition Cost is one of the most defining metrics here. Inbound marketing isn’t inexpensive, but it will produce results. It will create new customers for your business. But obviously, making sure your customer acquisition costs are reasonable in comparison to your lifetime customer value is critical.
Again, there’s no hard number. $100? That’s probably the conversation starter. $500? $1000? $10,000? Probably. The specific amount needed varies greatly by volume potential, the product/service itself and the industry you’re in. We’d be happy to talk through it with you. You can schedule some time with us right here.
Sales/Marketing Synergy
Would the marketing/sales synergies created support Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is about naturally attracting customer to you through content and then nuturing them through the sales cycle. The more complexity and touch points on that path to revenue, the more opportunity there is to use marketing technology to automate the processes that can and should be automated.
Using one of our education clients as an easy example, using marketing automation tools to connect potential students with their admissions team once they’re significantly further along the buyer’s journey has saved them thousands of hours per year. We’re leveraging that technology to qualify the huge volume of leads that are being generated – weeding out the tire kickers. That means their sales (admissions) team can focus their finite time on the leads that are likely to become enrolled students rather than throwing away time and energy on go-nowhere prospects.
Using a platform like Hubspot, not only are you able to create marketing efficiency, but you’re able to pair that with sales-centric features that allow you to truly harmonize your marketing and sales functions.
