Why an Inbound Marketing Agency's Work Is Never Truly Done

Inbound marketing agencies are constantly working behind the scenes to ensure their partners meet and exceed their marketing goals. Perfecting their inbound marketing strategy is not a short-term achievement, but a long-term effort requiring consistent research, observation, content production, testing, and modification to be successful.

What Do Inbound Marketing Agencies Do?

In simple terms, inbound marketing agencies work on behalf of their clients to produce useful and engaging content that attracts their ideal audience, and entices them to interact with their client’s brand further, ultimately leading to customer conversions.

There are many steps involved in creating and maintaining an effective inbound marketing strategy, and inbound marketers never stop working to improve their messaging and deliverability to reach the right prospects in the most impactful way.

Researching the Market

Gathering the necessary information on your market and customer base is essential to fully understanding how best to reliably connect with an audience.

Market research enables agencies to identify the various buyer personas you may not be targeting, while filtering and qualifying your leads to attract only the most promising prospects. It also provides a better picture of what your audience is looking for in terms of content and engagement opportunities.

They also monitor the competition in the industry and keep track of ever-changing market trends and movements, all to optimize your marketing reach and impact.

Observing Progress

Keeping track of your key performance indicators (KPI) is another important aspect of an inbound marketing agency’s responsibility to their clients. Tracking the results of your efforts is crucial to success, helping them gain a better idea of what facets of your strategy are working, and which need improvement.

Some of the most important KPIs for inbound marketing include:

• SEO Keyword Rankings
• Organic Traffic
• Bounce Rates
• Time on Website & Pages
• Social Media Engagement
• Click-Through Rates
• Marketing Qualified Leads
• Sales Qualified Leads
• Customer Lifetime Value
• Customer Acquisition Costs
• Conversion Rates
• Return on Investment (ROI)

Not every KPI may be relevant to your individual purposes, and some may rank as higher priorities than others. Regularly monitoring the metrics most important to your marketing efforts is an ongoing process marketers use to measure success and enhance approach.

Regularly Producing Content

When it comes to inbound marketing, content is king, and one of the chief roles of an inbound marketing agency is to produce useful and relevant content that encourages brand interaction and loyalty. The inbound methodology utilizes content as a vehicle to drive website traffic, brand awareness, and customer conversions.

Content can take the form of blogs, webpages, videos and even podcasts, but the basic guiding principles remain the same. Inbound content is designed to be as personalized and pertinent as possible, to attract, inform, and delight your audience, while serving as a resource for them to come back to later.

Agencies understand that generating valuable content at a regular cadence will aid your SEO rankings and organic search traffic, ultimately helping your messaging stand out to your intended audience.

Conducting Tests

Inbound marketing agencies also regularly test different aspects of their strategies to improve their impacts. This helps them gain a better comprehension of your audience’s behavior and preferences, providing the opportunity to alter specific elements of your content, website, or deployment to see what your prospective customers respond to most.

Some of the most common tests for inbound marketing include:

• A/B Testing: This is an experiment comparing multiple versions of a website page to examine which performs better, and why. When coupled with data-driven analytics, it can help enhance your website and improve click-throughs and conversion rates.
  
  
• Website Usability Testing: This research method enables participants to evaluate a brand’s website, products, or services to observe their interactions and assess how easy they are to use.
  
  
• Eye Track Testing: This technique measures a user’s eye movements to track where their gaze is drawn when perusing a website. This can reveal what features of your site or content are especially effective at providing a great user experience, and which require additional improvement.
  
  
• Content Testing: Similar to A/B testing, this enables agencies to change facets of their content to examine which approach is more effective to a specific audience segment. Some of the most common aspects to test for are headlines, images, opt-in forms, and calls to action.
  
  
• Multivariate Testing: Agencies use this practice to analyze numerous components of a website concurrently, enabling them to deploy multiple combinations of different website elements and changes in real time, all while monitoring which sequences yield the best results.

Modifying Their Approach

This is where agencies apply the lessons learned from research, observations, and testing to enhance your overall strategy, for optimum effect.

What areas of your content plan, website layout, or audience targeting can be improved? Are there any additional opportunities to encourage more brand engagement or conversions? Have you identified any new or emerging market segments? Are there any specific webpages, products, or pieces of content that have performed especially well?

Collecting all this information and much more, they can ameliorate the parts of your approach that aren’t working, while developing and capitalizing on the elements that do work, to expand and refine your target audience, boost traffic and brand awareness, and ultimately increase customer conversions.

Each of these undertakings are constantly evolving as the others progress, and they’re all absolutely necessary to ensure the success of your marketing strategy. This is part of what makes inbound marketing agencies such invaluable assets to their clients.

Contact Morey Creative Studios, a Diamond HubSpot Partner Agency, to get started optimizing your inbound strategy today!