You’re probably accustomed to pitching to prospective customers-- you know what you need to say to bring them around to thinking that your product or service is the right product or service for them. But do you have what it takes to bring your own team around to the idea of changing up the way you market?
Before you incorporate inbound into your marketing strategy, you’ll need to get your team on board with the concept. How do you do it? Here are a few tips to help you sell inbound marketing services to your team.
Tip #1: Help the team understand the ins and outs of inbound marketing.
If the other people on your team don’t understand what inbound marketing entails, it’s likely that they’ll reject the idea out of hand. With that in mind, take the time to give everyone a brief explanation of what makes inbound marketing different from traditional, or outbound, marketing.
Here’s the good news: inbound marketing is becoming more and more commonplace, so it’s likely that they’ve at least heard of it. But if you start throwing terms like call-to-action or search engine optimization at them without explaining what they mean (and how they’ll benefit your marketing strategy), you’re going to lose them before you get very far.
Give them a quick rundown on the basics, explaining what inbound is as well as how it will positively impact your specific strategy. Use everything you can find— case studies and stats can sometimes sway the crowd better than painting a verbal picture of the advantages that following the buyer’s journey will bring to your strategy.
Tip #2: Show the team why it’s time to make a change.
You’ve heard the saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” It’s very likely that your team approaches marketing with that mindset. After all, if your marketing strategy is bringing in leads, why change what you’re doing?
Sure, you’re bringing in leads, but are you bringing in as many as you COULD if you made some tweaks to your strategy? This is where you break out the big guns.
- Conduct a website audit. An audit will give you the data you need to convince your team that your website isn’t performing as well as it could. A good site crawling tool, like Screaming Frog, will help you point out less-than-successful meta descriptions, links, and page titles.
- Check with Google. Where does your business’s page rank? Are you on the first page, or the thirty-first? Google’s Webmaster Tools will help you track the traffic patterns on your website, offering an in-depth analysis of you site’s access, search engine indexing, and influence rankings.
- Compare your site to your competitors. This is where you’ll get the team fired up. How is your site ranking in comparison to your competitors? Are they featured on the front page of the search engine result page (SERP) while you’re buried somewhere far behind them? If your team sees that your business is lagging behind the competition, they might be more inclined to shake things up.
Tip #3: Examine your current framework
If your team is concerned about the amount of effort it might take to incorporate inbound principles into your marketing strategy, you might be able to put their minds at ease if you can point out the areas in which you’re already set up for inbound marketing.
Do you have a blog? Are you already using software to track the progress of your campaigns? Maybe your social media engagement is rock solid, with high levels of engagement. Look to your current strengths and see how they can be incorporated into an inbound strategy.
Tip #4: Crunch the numbers.
Bottom line: inbound marketing is more cost-effective than outbound marketing. While outbound marketing depends on tactics such as radio, television, direct mail, and paid Google ads that interrupt the customer as they go about their day, inbound marketing provides valuable content to potential customers, offering answers to their pain points.
For a small company, inbound marketing’s cost per lead averages at $37, while outbound costs a whopping $102 per lead. It might take longer to create the content that will get a customer’s attention, but that content can be effective for years to come. A television ad is expensive and it’s only effective for as long as you continue to run it— as soon as your payments stop, the effectiveness evaporates.
Tip #5: Don’t go it alone.
Yes, you can create an inbound marketing campaign in-house, but if you’re not sure you’ve got the full support of the team or if you don’t have the bandwidth to make the change in an effective manner, you can bring an experienced inbound marketing firm on board.
A full-service agency has the tools and the know-how to get your inbound strategy up and running as quickly as possible, ensuring that you’ll see success sooner than later. Better yet, an agency will be completely up-to-date on the latest marketing trends, so you’ll always be one step ahead of your competitors. Attempting to stay on top of it all with your in-house team can feel overwhelming at best, and completely impossible on some days. (Like, for instance, when Google changes up their algorithm again, forcing you to reevaluate your SEO plan.) A qualified inbound marketing agency will handle it for you, using their team of specialists to tackle anything that comes their way.
Are you ready to get started? Let’s talk! Click here to contact us to discuss implementing inbound into your marketing strategy today.
