Thinking About an Inbound Marketing Program for Revenue Growth?
Inbound marketing is a tremendous growth opportunity for manufacturing companies. Whether you’re in plastics, metals, corrugated, electronics, or another manufacturing sector, inbound marketing stands to consistently — and increasingly — generate highly qualified leads for your business. As with many other strategic efforts, however, you’ll need to prove the ROI of inbound marketing in order to justify your investment.
Right off the bat, calculating the ROI of inbound marketing is fairly straightforward:
ROI = [ Net Profit / Investment Cost ] X 100
Of course, there’s likely more that goes into the above components of the equation for your business, but the above equation is the basic math for determining the ROI of inbound marketing.
It’s important to note that the above calculation represents the ROI for a specific period of time. It would have to be recalculated regularly and consistently, because inbound marketing continues to pay dividends long after the initial investment has been made. That’s the magic of inbound marketing. Let’s dive into this below.
But First, a Quick Refresher
Inbound marketing is the “pull” of a marketing strategy. It seeks to draw visitors to your website and other digital assets in order to convert them into leads. This is a complementary approach to outbound marketing, which is the “push” component of strategy and seeks to get your business in front of people proactively. You can learn more about the differences between them here.
How Inbound Marketing Excels with Lead Generation
With inbound marketing, you’ll create a variety of digital assets — blogs, landing pages, new pages on your website, automated emails, social media content, and more. Additionally, and more than ever, other assets such as video and podcasts are playing a major role in the success of inbound marketing programs. The value of these assets is not short lived. Most of these assets perform for months and years, continuing to produce leads for your business long after they were first created.
In fact, depending on the topic and the keyword selected, it’s not uncommon for blogs to continue pulling in levels of traffic that are at or above some of the highest visited pages on a website (not only because of the valuable information they contain and their performance in the eyes of search engines, but also because of the longevity of the keyword itself). And consider your favorite podcast. It’s likely that you’ve returned to certain episodes or shared them with others — meaning the asset has value beyond a first listen.
Additionally, the flexibility of these assets allows them to be repurposed into others. For example, if you have three to four blogs that explore a certain topic, you can easily package them together into a downloadable asset and market that in various ways, further extending their lead generation capability.
Thinking about the ROI of inbound marketing? Say it costs you a few hundred dollars to put together a podcast or an in-depth blog on a relevant topic. Considering that your most ideal customer is going to result in tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for your business, it’s clear right away — without bothering to do the calculation — that the ROI of this inbound marketing asset is significant. Even the lowest conversion rate on one of these assets makes the initial investment well worth it.
Inbound Marketing is a Long-Term Effort
A significant focus of inbound marketing is search engine optimization (SEO). Because these assets take time to be identified and indexed by search engines, results typically come anywhere from 30 to 90 days after completion. But patience, consistency, and strategy pay off — in many instances, manufacturers that invest in inbound marketing find that it becomes their most significant source of lead generation. Explore a variety of case studies here where manufacturers leveraged a holistic outbound and inbound marketing approach to generate leads — and won them.
Experience Unparalleled ROI on Inbound Marketing with Athena
Athena partners with manufacturers across numerous sectors nationwide to help them implement a structured, repeatable marketing and sales process that results in strong revenue growth. Combining outbound marketing and inbound marketing, along with front-end sales support and ongoing sales coordination, our team effectively creates a division of labor for your business — allowing us to focus on generating leads and qualifying them while your core sales team focuses on high value and strategic tasks. Together, we help you grow revenue and win the new business you’ve been looking for to achieve your growth goals.