What Does an Inbound Marketing Agency Do?
With more than 40 different types of marketing in use today, distinguishing between all the various options can be nearly impossible. As one of the most effective approaches, inbound marketing is becoming increasingly popular. Inbound marketing agencies provide valuable services to help their clients grow, but a lot of people don’t understand what they actually do.
The answer is deceptively simple: An inbound marketing agency performs inbound marketing. This brings us to the next obvious question...
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a refined approach to attract customers by providing valuable content, engaging solutions, and meaningful support. This deviates from traditional outbound marketing. While outbound marketing utilizes tactics such as ads, cold calling, and mass emails to reach potential customers, inbound marketing produces targeted content to draw them to you. Think of it as the difference between pounding a nail into wood with an oversized mallet versus assembling a ship in a bottle with precision and care.
Inbound marketing and sales enablement platform HubSpot has developed a flywheel model to illustrate the process. Inbound agencies aim to attract, engage, and delight, transforming strangers into prospects, then clients, and finally promoters. Once fully developed, the flywheel gains enough momentum to sustain growth with minimal investment in customer acquisition.
The benefits of inbound marketing speak for themselves. It saves time and money, boosts brand awareness, generates leads, fosters sustainable growth, brings together marketing and sales, establishes your expertise, and builds relationships.
So now that you understand what inbound marketing is, we can finally answer the question:
What Does an Inbound Marketing Agency Do?
Inbound marketing agencies provide integrated marketing services intended to draw customers in organically, rather than actively pursuing them. Both B2B and B2C clients can benefit from this approach. Offerings vary between agencies, but most focus on the following core services:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
First and foremost, inbound marketing agencies aim to attract people who may benefit from businesses like yours. SEO is critical to getting your site seen. After all, when you search for something on Google, you probably don’t look past the first few results.
Effective SEO requires careful onsite optimization following best practices for site navigation, URL structure, page speed, URL redirects, and site mapping. Content should be thorough, high quality, and include internal links, external links, and carefully researched keywords positioned strategically within the post.
The top inbound agencies apply current SEO best practices to the work they create and conscientiously monitor changes to Google’s algorithm that may affect their clients’ sites.
Content Development
Content is the heart of inbound marketing. According to HubSpot’s “Not Another State of Marketing Report,” approximately 60% of those surveyed felt content marketing was “very” or “extremely” important. Inbound agencies produce blog posts and content offers that provide readers with value. To do this, they conduct audience research to understand what will attract your potential clients, develop strategies that align with your business goals, and then marry research and strategy to develop a comprehensive content plan. Pieces are carefully crafted for effective search engine optimization, demand generation, lead generation, and lead nurturing. Most agencies also promote content on social media to increase exposure.
Beyond its obvious SEO and traffic generation value, content is also beneficial for sales, onsite and social engagement, and brand authority.
Email Marketing
While inbound marketing agencies engage in email marketing, they take a more targeted approach than traditional methods. Rather than pushing spammy material on recipients who can’t find the unsubscribe button quickly enough, inbound agencies use segmented lists to get pertinent information to the right people at the right time, thereby increasing the odds that they’ll read it and respond.
Web Design & Development
A well-designed website can elevate your business’s image, attract customers, and improve accessibility. It’s also a critical aspect of SEO. That’s why inbound agencies include web design and development in their suite of services. While some offer this option separately from content development, a comprehensive package that fuses content and web development is usually the most effective solution.
HubSpot Implementation
HubSpot is the preeminent platform used by inbound marketing agencies. It has a robust suite of features divided into six sections: Marketing Hub, CMS Hub, CRM, Operations Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub. The Marketing Hub is best-in-breed technology that supports the development of websites, blogs, emails, lead capture tools, and ads while providing valuable metrics to track performance. Other hubs support different aspects of your business, including sales, customer relationship management, operations, and more. This centralizes multiple processes on one convenient platform, for greater integration and efficiency.
A skilled inbound marketing agency can help your business implement HubSpot correctly so you can maximize its potential. Whether you’re looking exclusively for marketing support or would also like to improve other facets of your business, inbound agencies can migrate your existing materials into HubSpot, build out back end integrations to existing systems, and train your team members in how to use the platform.
Sales Enablement
HubSpot defines sales enablement as the “iterative process of providing your business’s sales team with the resources they need to close more deals. These resources may include content, tools, knowledge, and information to effectively sell your product or service to customers.” In addition to supplying materials to help attract clients, inbound agencies provide content to engage prospects, such as blog posts, white papers, one-pagers, and more.
At their core, inbound marketing agencies provide strategy and support to help businesses acquire clients by optimizing their website and content.
A New York-based Diamond HubSpot Partner Agency, Morey Creative Studios specializes in B2B inbound content development, CMS, CRM, web design, accessibility, podcast production, and more. Contact us today to learn about how the inbound approach can help your business and its customers thrive.