Inbound Marketing Services Guide

It’s no secret that technology has drastically changed how everyone does business. Regardless of industry, the internet's interconnectedness has created globalized marketplaces and several new ways to attract and retain customers.

While this relatively new marketing breadth can translate to a world of opportunity for smart businesses, it can also become detrimentally competitive to unprepared teams.

To properly position your company to tap into this opportunity without growing overwhelmed, a smart digital marketing strategy is essential.

To this end, an inbound marketing services provider can be a huge help to your sales and marketing teams. These professionals can supercharge your digital marketing efforts and organically and efficiently connect you and your team with qualified potential buyers.

The criteria, tips, and explanations provided in Clutch’s inbound marketing services hiring guide will help you and your team thoroughly evaluate any vendors to determine the best fit for your business.

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What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is often considered to be the opposite of more traditional practices such as cold calling or circulating print advertisements. These practices would fall under the umbrella of outbound marketing.

While outbound marketing seeks to get a business in front of as many people as possible, regardless of their interest level, inbound marketing seeks to introduce consumers into a firm’s sales funnel in a more organic manner.

This mission is realized through a combination of digital marketing practices, including but not limited to the following:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Content marketing
• Earned social media campaigns
• Influencer marketing
• Webinars and other knowledge-sharing events

Each of these methods serves to spotlight your business to those vested interest in what you do and may be actively looking for a supplier of your products or services.

To maximize the effectiveness of inbound marketing efforts, it is crucial to identify ideal customer profiles (ICPs) that represent the traits of the most relevant buyers to your business. These ICPs will guide how each aspect of your inbound marketing campaigns is executed.

When managed properly, the benefits of inbound marketing should ripple throughout a business's overall sales and marketing operations.

Many marketers see inbound marketing as contributing to a larger inbound methodology with three steps: attract, engage, and delight.

By generating and promoting useful content throughout its marketing channels, a business is working to attract qualified leads to its sales funnel.

Once these leads are aware of the business and its offerings, the inbound sales representatives work to engage them, evaluate their needs, and determine how the business can help them reach their goals.

Once these engaged leads have converted into clients, account executives must work with them to ensure they are delighted by their experience throughout the engagement, making them more likely to be attracted to the business again for future projects.

Inbound Marketing Service Providers by Country

Inbound Marketing Service Providers by City

4 Benefits of Inbound Marketing Services

Based on what we’ve discussed, it isn’t difficult to conclude that inbound marketing can benefit almost any business. The ability to organically attract interested customers is something that most businesses would jump at.

However, the benefits of inbound marketing go beyond this attraction. By putting a fresh spin on a company’s marketing approach, inbound marketing can have the following benefits:

1. Reach New Audiences. Whether through generating and refining ICPs or re-prioritizing digital marketing channels, any inbound marketing engagement will likely start with a working session to redefine your digital marketing strategy. In doing so, you’ll likely be able to connect more effectively with audiences to which you and your team were previously invisible.
2. Generate More Qualified Leads. Through its content-driven nature, inbound marketing allows businesses to target particular market segments intentionally. Assuming this targeting is backed up by the proper market research, inbound marketing should, in turn, bring in more qualified leads that are more likely to make one or more purchases.
   
3. Realize Digital Marketing Efficiencies. Although inbound marketing still takes a lot of work to plan and execute, it is a far more efficient approach to attracting new business than outbound marketing. By embracing inbound marketing as a part of your digital marketing strategy, your marketing team will likely operate more efficiently.
   
4. Calibrate Your Brand Identity. Especially when examined through the inbound methodology lens, inbound marketing is a practice that can reshape all corners of a company’s sales and marketing strategy. This reshaping is a great way to ensure that all aspects of a brand’s identity operate in the best possible way to represent the brand to potential customers ideally.
   

What Services Do Inbound Marketing Firms Provide?

Inbound marketing decisions can potentially influence digital marketing and sales strategy trends. Because of this, inbound marketing service providers will also likely offer other sales and marketing services.

Consider if these complementary services may be of use to you as you evaluate the best inbound marketing partners for your business:

Content Marketing

A core tenet of inbound marketing is the generation of useful, industry-specific content that can generate organic interest among the most prime potential customers.

Content marketing is all about doing just that. An inbound marketing provider offering content marketing support can help you craft thought-provoking content that resonates with your ICPs and fits in with your larger marketing and sales initiatives.

SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) and content marketing have a symbiotic relationship within the world of inbound marketing.

By leveraging specific keywords or phrases and webpage configurations to establish the value of your digital presence to search engines and position your website higher in search result pages, SEO ensures that the fruits of your content marketing efforts don’t go unnoticed.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a newer sub-discipline of inbound marketing, but that doesn’t make it less valuable to businesses of all sizes and industries.

Influencers garner trust from their social media followers daily in several subject areas. If those subject areas align with your business’ offerings or an influencer’s audience aligns with one of your ICPs, a brand partnership with them can do wonders for your organic website traffic.

Digital Marketing

All of the functions we’ve mentioned so far, including inbound marketing, are a subset of digital marketing.

If your business operates with no dedicated marketing department or is looking to inject a new perspective into your digital marketing strategy, partnering with an experienced digital marketing firm can help you sustainably improve your overall digital marketing presence through your inbound marketing engagement.

Full-Service Digital

Full-service digital agencies handle both digital marketing and advertising functions for businesses needing support.

Suppose the scope of the business goals you want to meet in your next inbound marketing project goes beyond the confines of inbound marketing or digital marketing. In that case, a full-service digital firm may be your ideal partner.

What Services Do Inbound Marketing Firms Provide?

Because inbound marketing is more of a cost center than a revenue-generating activity for most businesses, basing the success of your inbound marketing engagement on the revenue generated by your sales team may only tell part of the story.

Instead, you and your team can rely on key performance indicators such as the following to determine how well your inbound marketing campaigns are performing:

• Organic Traffic captures the number of visitors to your website via unpaid sources such as search engines. This figure can be easily tracked in marketing analytics platforms. Its trend over time can help you get a pulse on how effectively your inbound marketing efforts drive traffic to your pages.
• Time-on-Site or Time-on-Page are great ways to see how effectively your content and website layout maintain your audience’s attention. These statistics measure the average time users spend on your site or web page.
  
• Bounce Rate shows the percentage of visitors to a given page who leave the page without taking a secondary action, such as filling out a form or clicking a link to another page. A bounce rate that is too high on a page means it likely isn’t resonating with organic visitors.
  
• Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost (LTV:CAC) is a ratio that represents how effective your sales and marketing spend is at generating revenue. It is calculated by dividing your LTV (yearly average customer spend multiplied by the average number of years a customer will remain in contact) by your CAC (sales and marketing spend for a given period divided by the number of new customers acquired during that period).
  

Not all KPIs listed above will be directly attributable to your inbound marketing endeavors. Still, actively tracking these data points, as well as their trends over the lifetime of your project, will help you understand how effectively your inbound marketing partner is meeting your business goals.

What is an Inbound Marketing Team?

The wide-reaching nature of inbound marketing means that your inbound marketing partner will likely staff your project with team members specializing in several different disciplines.

Depending on the expansiveness of your engagement, you may work with professionals with titles including:

• Project Manager: The team member who keeps you connected with the team leads on your project and ensures that everything runs according to your desires. They are accountable for any preset project milestones.
  
• Content Marketer: The team member who crafts, edits, and publishes content on your website or social media platforms. They deliver industry blogs and data-driven posts that will get buyers to click on your website when it comes up in search results.
  
• SEO Specialist: The team member who ensures your website is best positioned for success in search engines. They conduct keyword research to make actionable recommendations and changes to your website to better connect with your target audience.
  
• Sales Development Representative: The team member who turns interested organic traffic into new clients for your business. They take the attracted leads and engage them to turn them into sales.
  
• Account Executive: The team member who manages relationships with your clients once they’ve begun a project with you and your team. They ensure your clients are delighted throughout the process, making them more likely to become repeat customers.
  

What to Look for When Hiring an Inbound Marketing Partner?

Inbound marketing can be the foundation of your entire digital marketing strategy, so it’s important to be thorough when looking for your next inbound marketing vendor.

Before contacting potential partners, ensure you, your team, and other relevant stakeholders agree on project requirements, need-by date, and cost ceiling. Additionally, consider if these firms have experience working with other firms of your size in your industry and seek out referrals or customer testimonials.

Once you have a shortlist of inbound marketing service providers, you’ll want to reach out and set up introductory calls to help you and your team get a feel for the unique facets of each provider.

Criteria for Hiring an Inbound Marketing Service Provider

• Competency with any relevant digital marketing tools and software
  
• Track record working with clients in your industry
  
• Ability to provide complementary marketing services
  
• Typical project cost and size
  
• Extensive portfolio of satisfied clients
  
• Availability for your intended period of performance
  

Referencing real-life Clutch reviews that detail the strengths and experiences of a potential partner can help you prioritize the best inbound marketing firms as you narrow your list down. Reviews on Clutch illustrate past performance and typical project demographics and are verified to guarantee that they are accurate and relevant to the business in question.

10 Questions to Ask When Hiring an Inbound Marketing Company

1. What digital marketing services can you help our business with during this project?
   
2. How many team members will you staff on this project?
   
3. Have you taken on clients who have operated in our industry previously?
   
4. What analytics platforms or other software do you use for projects like ours?
   
5. Which KPIs do you track for inbound marketing engagements?
   
6. How will you determine whether our engagement is successful?
   
7. What is the typical rate for projects similar to ours?
   
8. How long do you expect it to take for us to see results from our inbound marketing efforts?
   
9. How frequently do you typically meet with your clients once a project is ongoing?
   
10. Can you provide a reference list that will verify the quality and scope of your work?
    

As you narrow down your search and begin contacting potential inbound marketing service providers, don’t be afraid to share pertinent information about your goals and objectives for the project. Furthermore, ask vendors for clarification if they bring up a practice unfamiliar to you and your team.

Inbound Marketing Services Inform Smart Digital Strategy

Savvy marketers know that inbound marketing is the cornerstone of any forward-thinking digital marketing strategy. Qualified leads gathered through organic traffic to your website make for likely big spenders and repeat customers.

An inbound marketing service provider that understands the ins and outs of your business can build an insightful content calendar and make actionable SEO recommendations that position your site as ideally as possible to attract users from your ICPs.

Inbound marketing success often equals overall marketing success, so you’ll want to find the best possible partner for your next inbound marketing project. If you back up your vendor search with a top-tier B2B review platform such as Clutch and follow the guidelines here, you’ll be in the best spot to select a high-quality inbound marketing firm.

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