Inbound marketing can be a powerful means of generating new leads, but it’s a complex beast and has to be managed properly before it will deliver results. Every element in the inbound chain – from a social media post to landing page – has to be utilised according to its own best practices, and only digital marketers skilled in the use of these tools can build the kind of ROI-optimised sales funnels for which inbound marketing has become known. Of course, a shortage of these skills acts as a barrier to many businesses that want to do inbound themselves, but that’s not the only reason it’s a good idea to outsource your inbound marketing to an inbound marketing agency.
Here, we touch on several other advantages of outsourced lead generation:
Lower risks
When you hire your own inbound team, you risk having to make them redundant if inbound marketing does not work for you. By outsourcing to an inbound marketing agency, you negate that risk, as you don’t take on any additional employees. This also ensures that you keep staff turnover low. Entry level marketing personnel typically stay with a company for one to two years. Fewer replacements mean fewer interruptions to your operations.
Lower costs
Hiring your own inbound marketing team can be a good option if your business is of a significant size (thus offsetting some of the risk), but you need to keep your inbound team occupied if you want to see any kind of ROI. A full team is expensive, and if they are not producing results, it’s going to cost you. With an inbound marketing agency you get a broad skillset – strategy, copywriting, and design and development – at the cost of one employee’s salary.
Scalability
Maybe you decide to give inbound a trial run, and after three months you start to see results. Now, you decide that you want to scale up your inhouse inbound operations. The problem is that you first have to hire new employees (the right ones – which takes time) and upskill them before you start to see tangible results. With an outsourced inbound agency, the capacity and skills are there when you need them.
Support
When taking on inbound marketing, you need to adopt a platform like HubSpot. Though designed to be as intuitive as possible, these systems are still quite complicated, and your sales and marketing teams might not be completely enthusiastic about having to learn a new system. An inbound marketing agency, on the other hand, will already know how to get the most from the many powerful tools available on these platforms.
Saved time
An inbound marketing agency already has tried and tested processes in place, and it can do everything faster than a new inhouse team. Can you really afford to wait three to six months for your new team just to figure things out? In that time an agency would have already started generating leads.
Of course, there is a lot more to adopting inbound than deciding whether to outsource or whether to do it inhouse. In our guide to inbound marketing, we cover these various aspects and show you how they are pulled together in an effective inbound marketing strategy. To learn how you too can benefit from the ROI-generating power of inbound, download our inbound guide right here.
Image Credit:iscribed.com
