Blog Insights

How Inbound Marketing Works for Professional Services

New to the term inbound marketing? According to HubSpot,

Inbound marketing is about using marketing to bring potential customers to you, rather than having your marketing efforts fight for their attention. Sharing is caring, and inbound marketing is about creating and sharing content with the world. By creating content specifically designed to appeal to your dream customers, inbound attracts qualified prospects to your business and keeps them coming back for more. 

The concept of inbound marketing differs from outbound marketing in a number of different ways.

Every living being needs a few bare necessities to survive. For example, without at least air, food, water, and shelter, animals would die.

Your website is no different. 

If a website is only getting sporadic updates and attention, its survival rate, as it relates to lead generation and profitability, is slim to none. I’d be out of a job if this proved otherwise.

Let's put it plainly - dating sucks. Starting the painstaking process of finding someone special is enough to make anyone resolve to be single forever. If you've landed on this blog post, you're likely gaining insight regarding a new style of dating - how to find an inbound marketing agency that's right for you. You're probably overwhelmed and nervous about this process, and while it won't be easy or quick, there IS an inbound marketing agency that's perfect for you. Once you find it, business as you know it will never be the same!

The short answer is no. But the short answer is never the complete answer.

A question I often get asked is how much, and with what should I be tagging my blog posts and website pages?

The Leading Results team just invested 10 man-days at the Hubspot Inbound conference (3 of us for 3 days and 2 of us for a half day). If you are a marketer, you want to put this conference on your calendar for next year. The amount of great content and new things to learn was just about overwhelming. And it wasn’t all (or even mostly) about Hubspot software.  It covered marketing, life, customer delightion (a Hubspot word), charity, technology and trends – and those were just the sessions I personally went to.

There were great quotes from all the speakers throughout the conference – and some we thought worth sharing and considering. Here they are:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a hot topic. How do you get found amid a sea of other websites out there? There are three main ways that you can get found online. The easiest way (please be clear, I did not say best!) is to buy Pay-per-click advertising. The second easiest way (again, not best!) is to hire a firm that specializes in SEO and hope they can get you listed where you want, without getting you blacklisted. The third way is go do good old fashioned content publishing. Let's take a quick look at all three methods.

Here is a note we recently got from a client.  Names have been changed to keep anonymity, but the results are clear.

"Last week a company called XYZ widgets visited our web site. They were in our CRM system, but we didn’t have them in our pipeline due to management changes and difficulty getting through to speak with someone. Our sales team member called the company after their visit to our website was recorded and reported through the Visitor Insights tool that you installed on our website.  We had an appointment with them this morning. The salesman sent them the link to the video page that we recently got put up with your help and two people from the company viewed the videos. They told us that because of the videos they felt they needed to take a closer look at our product.  This represents approximately $75,000 to $90,000 in potential business that we would have missed out bidding on."

I considered labeling this post/case study “Why your blogging isn’t working” but instead, I’m presenting the results for an HVAC client of ours in NY who had been using inbound marketing via Hubspot since February.

I just started doing this case study when I was asked:

 "One of my friends said he tried blogging and it didn't work at all for him.    How do you know if this blogging and 'inbound marketing' is working for us?"