As I speak with prospective inbound marketing clients and onboard new ones, I am constantly warning against comparing apples to oranges. Frequently, this means comparing an inbound marketing proposal to a website redesign or a search engine optimization campaign or a social media marketing proposal.
It’s understandable that companies have limited budgets and are looking to stretch their marketing dollars as much as possible. And I’m not saying that inbound marketing should be an “all or nothing” proposition. However, it is important to understand the tradeoffs when you decide to implement partial inbound marketing. As such, I thought I would create a chart that showed what you’re giving up when you implement one aspect of inbound marketing without one or more of the others.
Here’s an explanation of the categories:
- Website: This refers to making sure you have a well designed website that is architected in a way that drives visitors to specific business-related outcomes that will convert them into leads and/or customers.
- SEO: Proper search engine optimization is not just about ranking #1 for given keywords. It involves solid keyword research that leads to the identification of foundation, long tail and opportunity keywords (subscribers to the Inbound Marketing Inquirer will be familiar with these terms).
- Promotion: In this case, we’re talking primarily about social media promotion but paid advertising is also on the table.
- Conversion: This involves creating compelling calls to action on multiple pages on your website that drive traffic to carefully crafted landing pages containing an offer and a conversion form.
- Analytics: This particular case is different from the others. It’s the one tactic that is always a good idea regardless of which other tactics and strategies you’re employing. DOOO EEET NOWW!
And so here is your chart of partial inbound marketing tradeoffs (click on image to download PDF version):
