Inbound Marketing Investment: Budgeting Your Time and Resources

Money aside, Inbound Marketing is a huge time investment for any business looking to strengthen its online presence.

A great way to strengthen your online presence is by creating resourceful content, that's necessary to attract more qualified leads.

Inbound Marketing is a long-term commitment. Before customers can find you, you need to have content, and building an impressive library of content does not happen overnight.

Creating and tracking content is a lengthy process, but the time commitment does not end there.

Long Term Commitment

Planning

Before starting an inbound campaign, you need to factor in the time it takes to plan. Your team must evaluate your campaign data and ROI and decide what needs to be changed as you move forward.

Depending on the current state of your marketing strategy, the amount of time this takes will vary.

At IMPACT, we strive to get our client’s their comprehensive Marketing GamePlan in less than 30 days.

Learning & Implementing

If you have never dealt with Inbound Marketing before, its platforms may be completely new to you.

Learning the ins and outs or dos and don’ts of blogging, Facebook, Twitter, SEO, etc. takes time and practice to fully understand.

Inbound Marketing software, like HubSpot, can help you greatly in terms of organizing, tracking, and integrating all of your marketing efforts. Software like this, however, does take time to learn and get accustomed to as well.

Maintaining & Evaluating

Don’t start something you can’t finish! Once your website, blog, and different social media accounts have been created, maintenance is key. If you are going to harness their power, make sure you can set aside time to at least:

• Blog twice a week

• Spend 20 minutes on each social media outlet, each day

• Post a new call to action and offer twice a month

• Learn something new from your lead data every day

• Review your analytics once a week and make adjustments

• Interact with audience across platforms (respond to comments, complaints, etc.)

Do You Need to Bring in Extra Help?

Inbound Marketing is in no way a one-man job. According to Forbes, it takes 32 hours a month to manage just a single social media profile. Add blogging, ebooks, and whitepapers to the mix and you’ve got one unhappy and overworked marketing team.

Depending on how aggressive your goals are, you may need to assign multiple people to implementing and maintaining your various inbound efforts. The greater your goals, the more you need to put out, and the more people you will need to keep the plan running smoothly.

While each company and industry is different, you’ll inevitably face the same question; do I have the time and resources to execute a successful inbound marketing campaign in-house, or would it be smarter and more cost-efficient to hire an agency?

Thinking About Investing in Inbound Marketing?

Check out our newest Ebook! You will learn everything you need to know in order to make a smarter, more successful investment with inbound marketing and get the results you need.