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Understanding How The Inbound Marketing Tactics Work Together Is The Key

I’ve done a lot of talking and a lot of writing about inbound marketing, running an inbound marketing agency and how inbound agency owners should be thinking about their shops. Most of that content has ignored the specific tactics we’re all executing. These include websites, blogging, content creation, social, search and email marketing.

I’ve always had the position that everyone knows what the tactics are and how to execute them. My theory has always been that programs fail or underdelver when the strategy or the tactical orchestration is missed or done incorrectly. I still believe that.

But for the first time ever, at Inbound 17, I’m going to be talking about the tactics and how they’re used to predict results and get results for clients at Square 2 Marketing. It’s going to be special. If you’re attending and you should be (we covered that two weeks ago) and you still need to register, the session is filling up fast. Click here to grab your seat.

Continuing our conversation about differentiating your inbound marketing agency means honestly evaluating your ability to be an inbound marketing expert. Are you a pro or a pretender? Unfortunately, my evaluation of the true capabilities in most of the agencies calling themselves inbound agencies is more pretender than pro.

I’m not criticizing. I’m actually challenging anyone reading this to step up their game. The consequences of continuing to “fake it” is going to impact the entire community. We’re already seeing it. More and more of our opportunities are made up of companies who have had disappointing experiences with inbound. This has to change.

Before Prospects Hire You For Inbound, You Have To Move Them Out Of Their Comfort Zone

Your prospects are human beings. That might sound obvious, but we ignore that fact every single day. Because they’re humans, they don’t want to change, they don’t want to stop doing what they’ve been doing for 20 years, just because you showed up and introduced them to inbound marketing.

In fact, they are going to do everything in their power to NOT make changes. They are going to convince themselves and everyone around them that inbound marketing is just like what they’re currently doing.

Oh, inbound….that includes email marketing—we already do that. Oh, inbound…that includes search, we hired an SEO firm last year and that didn’t work out. Inbound…do we need software for that? Right, well we have salesforce.com, that’s almost the same thing. We’re good.

They’re pre-programed to NOT make any changes. Changes are scary, people get fired for changes. So you’re going to have to work extra hard to move them out of their comfort zone, to disrupt their status quo and get them to feel like if they DON’T change, they are going to be facing even bigger risks.

Did you know not all inbound marketing agency blogging is created equal?

Have you already figured out that it’s difficult to make money and I mean real money blogging? Are you charging your clients what it’s costing you plus margin to produce all their blog articles?

Unless you’re charging your clients $1,000 per blog you’re either losing money, not making enough money or looking at your blog as a loss leader while you make more margin on your other services.

Break it down. How long does it take to produce a high quality blog that’s search engine optimized and optimized for social too? Remember, it’s not just the writing.

If you’re an inbound marketing agency owner, then you have a lot to be thankful for during this holiday season. While I know it might seem like your hair is on fire most days and clients have become more and more demanding there has never been a time when so many tools and resources are available to delight every client.

The challenge for most of us has become how do we leverage the tools and resources efficiently and at the right time to enable our agencies and our teams to deliver on our service promise—we’ll get you leads.

For those of you who’ve got eight to ten inbound marketing engagements under your belt, you might have heard this once or twice. “I know you’ve gotten us more visitors to our website and leads from our marketing effort but we haven’t seen the increase in revenue you promised us.”

First, you see an inherent challenge in the Inbound Agency path we’ve chosen. Despite having NEVER promised anyone anything, almost every client hears revenue increase when you say leads from inbound. Next, you realize that most of these businesses are as weak in sales as they are in marketing.

I have regular contact with five or six agency owners ever single week and what I see more often than any other challenge is an agency’s inability to add detailed marketing strategy to their inbound marketing engagements.

Don’t get me wrong, almost every agency is charging for, selling and delivering marketing strategy, but this isn’t the kind of marketing strategy required to move the needle with inbound engagements.

It’s not hard to see where the problem is, after all, most agencies practicing inbound marketing today used to do something else. They used to build websites, or handle public relations, some did pure branding and others focused on search engine optimization.

This might not sound like a revelation, but that’s probably because you’re not exactly sure what we mean. I know every decent agency talks about strategy and most of them actually deliver strategy work for their clients.

But strategy for an inbound marketing program is different than strategy for a social media campaign, website deliverable or any traditional ad campaign.

Today most of the firms who call themselves an inbound marketing agency are paying lip service to the idea of strategy. They create a handful of personas and off they go. The reason for this limited approach to strategy is twofold.