A question that we often get here at Leap Clixx, is “where are my Inbound Marketing dollars best spent?” As usual, this is a great and intelligent question – which stands to reason, because we have a knack for finding great and intelligent clients!
The fundamental thing to keep in mind here, is that each business is different, and so is each marketplace. As such, there is no “one-size-fits-all” answer. In fact, any agency or consultant that tries to convince you that there’s a standard, definitive answer, is really just saying anything they can do get you to fork over your cash. Run – don’t walk – away, and you’ll save yourself plenty of money, time and stress.
However, with this being said, there are indeed some areas within an overall Inbound Marketing plan that can certainly qualify as low investment, high return. These areas include (but aren’t limited to):
1. Blog Posts
Regularly publishing relevant, engaging and well-written content to your blog remains at the heart of a successful and profitable Inbound Marketing program. And by regularly we don’t mean once a month, once a week, or whenever someone “has the time” (which is usually next to never!).
The best practice is to blog once per business day, although for programs with smaller budgets, three times a week is acceptable. Focusing your Inbound Marketing dollars in this area will help you lay a rock solid foundation that will impress your customers and depress your competition. Oh, and it’ll make Google happy as well, which is always a good thing!
2. Offers
Your blog posts should be integrated with offers, such as ebooks, white papers, reports, Infographics, and so on. Aside from helping you establish your role as “thought leader” in your marketplace, what these offers have in common is that they’re digital and instantly downloaded, which means that you can “gate” them – i.e. put them behind a contact form, and trade them to your customers in exchange for some valuable information (name, email address, and possibly more in some circumstances).
Keep in mind that while you don’t need to spend a small fortune on these offers, they definitely need to be well researched and written, and professionally designed. In other words, they need to be useful, engaging, impressive and appreciated by your customers.
3. Web Design/Re-Design
Your website will always be your company’s most valuable digital property, and that means it needs to look professional, load rapidly, be thoroughly functional, and of course, use responsive design so that it looks just as amazing on a 20” desktop computer screen as it does on an iPad. Investing your Inbound Marketing dollars to either improve or re-imagine your website is definitely money well spent!
4. Social Media
Most businesses have some kind of social media footprint, such as a Facebook or Twitter account. However, most businesses are NOT leveraging these assets to their full potential, and as such they’re missing out on an extremely important – and profitable – way to engage their community and extend their reach. Allocating some budget towards refreshing social media accounts/creating new accounts, and then regularly populating them with fresh, relevant content is another great way to achieve ROI.
5. Project Management
And last but not least, all of these investments – and the overall Inbound Marketing program and each campaign – needs to be pulled together through effective DAILY project management. If your business cannot commit to spending at least 2-3 hours each day managing all of the tasks that are part of a single campaign (let alone multiple campaigns running at the same time!), then arguably the wisest Inbound Marketing investment you can make is to buy the project management help you need.
You can then basically “set it and forget it”, and focus on receiving weekly/monthly/quarterly/semi-annual reports and engaging in high level executive discussions, instead of getting lost in a sea of deadlines and deliverables.
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For more insight on the question “where are my Inbound Marketing dollars best spent?”, contact the experts at Leap Clixx today. We’ll help you optimize your budget, so that you’re on track to reap ROI faster and sooner than you imagine.
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