Inbound Marketing: Buy-In, Budgets and Best Practices
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You may have heard of inbound marketing, but how can you use it to effectively market your products and drive revenue? This presentation will show you how to get other stakeholders in your company on board with inbound marketing, how it will impact your bottom line and how it has worked for others. Request a Consultation: http://enterpriseinbound.kunocreative.com/inbound-services-quote
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Inbound Marketing: Buy-In, Budgets and Best Practices
- 1. Buy-In, Budgets, & Best Practices. Chris Knipper, CEO, Founder INBOUND MARKETING
- 2. INBOUND MARKETING The process of creating quality content that is of interest to your target audience and then publishing that content throughout many our your digital channels to pull your prospect, inward, to you. You do this by educating them and solving their problems. The DEFINITION
- 3. The VEHICLE
- 5. What Inbound Marketing IS NOT. 1 It is not a marketing campaign
- 6. INBOUND FAILS AS TEST B2B EXAMPLE Email Blast & Advertising
- 7. INBOUND WINS B2B EXAMPLE Consistent Leads From All Sources – Organic, Referral, & Social
- 8. Why Inbound Marketing Fails as a “TEST” Campaign Marketing Campaign Product Centric Sales & Promo’s Short Term – Campaign Bottom of Sales Funnel Inbound Marketing User Centric Educate & Solve Problems Not a Campaign – Ongoing Top and Middle of Funnel
- 9. 80% 20% Buyer Process JOURNEY 80% of B2B Purchase Cycles Happen Before Contacting Sales Source – Forbes
- 10. INBOUND MARKETING 80% Research 20 % Buyer Process JOURNEY Sales OUTBOUND MARKETING 80% Sales 20 % Research
- 11. INBOUND WINS B2B2C EXAMPLE After 3 Years, 1,000 -> 100,000 Visitors, Sales Up 300%
- 12. 1 It is not a marketing campaign 2 It is not social media mgt. What Inbound Marketing IS NOT.
- 13. SOCIAL LEADS B2B2C EXAMPLE 276 New Leads From Social in 5 Months
- 14. 1 It is not a marketing campaign 2 It is not social media marketing 3 It is not a way to quickly cut costs What Inbound Marketing IS NOT.
- 15. CUTTING COSTS B2B EXAMPLE Overtime PPC Budget Transitioned to Inbound - Created More Leads PPC Leads Social, Direct & Organic Leads
- 16. GETTING BUY- IN W/SOCIAL Leads & Customers Get Buy-In Social Also Impacts Organic & Direct Create More Leads & Customers To Get Buy-In, Don’t Sell Cost Cutting
- 18. BENEFITS. What do CEOs care about? 1 Customer Acquisition Costs • All program and advertising spend / number of new customers • Set a Goal for improvement Source – Mike Volpe, CMO, HubSpot
- 19. BENEFITS. What do CEOs care about? 1 Customer Acquisition Costs 2 Marketing as a % of CAC Source – Mike Volpe, CMO, HubSpot
- 20. MARKETING. As a Percentage of CAC Long, complex sale 10-20% Inside sales, less complex 20-50% Short, simple sales 60-90% Source – Mike Volpe, CMO, HubSpot
- 21. BENEFITS. What do CEOs care about? 1 Customer Acquisition Costs 2 Marketing as a % of CAC 3 Ratio of life-time value to CAC Source – Mike Volpe, CMO, HubSpot
- 22. LIFE-TIME VALUE. To Customer Acquisition Costs CAC = $100,000 LTV = $400,000 LTV:CAC = 4 >3 is usually good for a growing company Or bad if under spending hurts growth Source – Mike Volpe, CMO, HubSpot
- 23. DIGITAL MARKETING. Average Budget = 2.5% Revenue – Marketing Budget < $5 Million - 7–8% $5–10 Million – 6–7% $10–100 Million – 5–6% $100–300 Million – 3–5% >$300 Million – 3–4% Source – Gartner & SBA
- 24. “Active digital marketers tend to devote about 30 percent of their marketing budgets to paid media, and 50 percent to content. Digital marketers can spend significantly less on marketing as a percentage of sales” – McKinsey & Company • 30% - Paid Media . • 50% - Content Budgets Digital Marketers
- 25. INBOUND MARKETING SCORECARD Measuring Content Marketing KPIs
- 26. • Output KPIs Blog posts, downloads, videos - Keeping track of the quantity and regularity of what we publish. • Interactive KPIs Measuring how good our content really is, as indicated by searches, views, likes, shares, comments and links. • Conversion KPIs Specifically measure the impact of your content marketing on lead generation How & What Do We Measure? Measuring Content Marketing KPIs
- 27. INBOUND MARKETING SCORECARD Measuring Content Marketing KPIs
- 28. BUY-IN -> BENEFITS. Summary 1 What to report to the CEO 2 Benchmarks for budgets 3 KPI to measure for success
- 29. Buy-In WHO’S ON BOARD?
- 30. The CREW
- 31. BEST PRACTICES BUILD A TEAM LEADER (strategy & project management) CONTENT (blogging, social media, design, seo) SOCIAL MEDIA (engagement & advertising) LEAD GEN (premium content, email, ppc, social ads) MKTG AUTOMATION (campaigns, lead management, lead scoring) SALES (ideally, integrated)
- 32. Who Else Needs • Product Managers • Sales • Legal • Regulatory TO BE INVOLVED?
- 33. INBOUND EXAMPLE
- 34. Calls-To-Action Facebook Microsite Lead Generation EXAMPLE
- 36. Traffic: +42% Leads: +508% Lead Generation EXAMPLE
- 37. 5 Days 5 Days 5 Days Lead Nurturing (Drip) Campaign
- 38. Traffic: +42% Leads: +508 MQL: +283% SQL: +631% Demo Requests: 421+ Customers: 55+ Revenue: $400,000+ Lead Nurturing EXAMPLE
- 40. QUESTIONS?
Editor's Notes
- Hello everyone. I’m Chris Knipper from Kuno Creative. We’re an enterprise inbound marketing agency and HubSpot Partner based in the Cleveland OH .Welcome to the webinar about Buy-in, budgets, and Best practices. I put together today’s webinar to share the experiences we have from working directly in the field with our customers. I’m going to focus today’s webinar on three topics – Getting Buy-In, Budgets for inbound marketing and & Best Practices. I picked those talking points, is because they relate to some of the most common questions we receive, such as how to get a get my leadership team on board with Inbound Marketing? How do I get their buy in? And how much should I budget? Can you share some of the best practices that will help me in those areas? Of course I won’t be able to cover every detail, but I’ll give you a top-level overview, that I hope you’ll find the information useful and that it helps you achieve the greatest success.
- So let’s get started. So, I see that we have quite a variety of folks on today’s webinar. I know some of you are very advanced, and know all about Inbound Marketing, and we also have some people in the audience that are just getting started.So very Quickly, I wanted to recap a definition of Inbound MarketingInbound Marketing is the process of creating quality content that is of interest to your target audience and then publishing content throughout many our your digital channels to pull your prospects, inward,to you. You do this by educating them and solving their problems.
- Or another way we like to think about inbound marketing, is like as a high performance race car. If you handle it right, you can beat the competition to the finish line every time you take it out on the track.
- But, Inbound marketing may be a different approach from what you’re already doing and without support you’ll most likely be going it alone on an uphill battle. The first topic of the webinar is about getting this support. We’ve seen many inbound marketing efforts fall short of meeting expectations. And without a questions, the most common reason, is a lack a buy-in at the management level of the company. Why does this happen? Usually the reason is a lack of understanding and education about what inbound marketing is, what it takes to do it, and how to measure to show results.
- It is sometimes easier to start by talking about what Inbound Marketing isn’t. A leadership team not understanding what it is in the first place is a common cause for not meeting expectations. #1 on the list is - It’s not a marketing campaign. This can be one of the hardest obstacles to overcome. For years marketers have used campaign driven metrics to measure results. You spend a certain amount of money on an ad campaign and then measure have many sales you get in return, and then calculate ROI. It has a definitive beginning point, and an end point. But the #1 mistake you can make for getting buy-in from management is to sell inbound marketing as a “test” campaign. This pretty much fails every time. It’s a methodology that is a different approach that addresses a different part of the buying cycle and sales pipeline.We’ve seen this happen many times. Inbound marketing gets compared to a one-off campaign, such as paid advertising, email blasts to a rented list or some type of singular event. There is set budget and results are measured immediately. Those are short-term outbound methods being compared to something completely different.
- So we does inbound marketing fail as a test campaign. It’s becauseit’s a different methodologythat addresses a different part of the buying cycle and a different part of your sales pipeline.Inbound marketing gets compared to a one-off campaign, such as paid advertising, email blasts to a rented list or some type of singular event. There is set budget to create product centric messages to drive sales today, in the short-term. But the problem with that approach is that many of the people you spent money to reach, are not ready to buy today. Your Outbound message is targeting the bottom of the sales funnel. Those that are ready to buy right now. And basically ignoring everyone else, who may very well want to buy from you in the future.With Inbound marketing - You messaging is User Centric, it’s not a slick ad campaign, it’s based on educating and solving the users’ problems. And the best part about it, is that the content created for Inbound marketing, is the gift that keeps on giving. There is no end date. It continues to exist throughout our channels and continues to nurture prospects to customers. You can see why comparing short-term outbound methods to inbound methods is an apples to oranges comparison. To get Buy-in from management don’t sell inbound as a campaign. You’ll most likely be setting yourself up for failure. We’ll soon talk about other metrics to help you to get buy-in from management.
- #2 on the list - Inbound Marketing is not is simply social media marketing. But we get calls regularly from companies, and they say they want help with social media marketing. According to recent surveys, just about every B2B and B2C company now plans to fund “Social media” as part of their marketing efforts. And this often starts with staffing someone internally to handle posting to social accounts like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. If you try to sell Inbound Marketing as the tool needed for the management of such social accounts, you will most likely get a budget that is equivalent to the budget for your summer interns.Having the right crew in place to manage social accounts is important, but think of Inbound Marketing as the engine that turns all of the content creation wheels and social as the channels, or roads in which much of that content travels. Both are important, but selling inbound as social media marketing, will rarely warrant the buy-in and funding that is needed to make the program work. Inbound marketing is not social media marketing.
- The 3rd biggest mistake we’ve seen for getting buy-in for inbound marketing is saying that using inbound marketing is going to cut costs. Industry studies show that the average cost per lead for inbound marketing is 60% less than outbound marketing.Although this may be true, if you’re trying to get buy-in and a budget approved, I wouldn’t start with a cost-cutting promise. As we mentioned, for many companies, inbound marketing is a different approach and hasn’t been done before. So you’re starting with a budget, in some cases, of zero. You may very well also have zero educational and helpful content created to date to date, and therefore cutting another part of your outbound budget and promising that it will be made up for with the new, lower cost leads coming from inbound marketing is a huge mistake. It will take time to build the resources, content, necessary activities, and show results. Remember, inbound marketing is not a marketing campaign, it’s a different methodology. We advise customers to look at a 12 – 18 month time frame. Those that do, have had great success. We advise to not immediately cut your other marketing efforts like paid advertising. You can adjust gradually over-time. What’s important is to get started with a realistic approach that can be measured. To get buy-in, don’t lead with a cost cutting proposal to management. It usually doesn’t work.
- OK, so we’ve talking about some budgets. And some of you on this webinar are already chiming in, in that chat box, and saying things like, $500k per year? Is Inbound Marketing only for large companies with budgets of this size, what about everyone else?My short answer is - anyone can do inbound marketing as long as there is some budget for the Team. I’ve seen companies with a little as $1mm in sales be successful at inbound marketing because they were willing to commit time and internal resources, with a mix of outsourced talent to make it happen. In those scenarios the cost of the team with a HR cost, not a line item in a marketing plan.We’ve also seen small companies not hesitate to budget $100k for one additional sales rep, but have literally no budget for inbound and wonder why cold calling and tradeshows isn’t working as well as it used to.But before we get more into that, let’s talk about some of the benefits.
- A recent blog article, published by HubSpot CMO, Mike Volpe talked about Metrics that a CEO cared about. And I’d like to share how those the metric tie into inbound marketing.Metric # 1.Customer acquisition costs - This is your total Sales and Marketing cost -- add up all the program or advertising spend, plus salaries, plus commissions and bonuses, plus overhead -- in a time period, divided by the number of new customers in that time period. For instance, if you spent $300,000 on Sales and Marketing in a month and added 30 customers that month, then your CAC is $10,000.to do something part way, for a short period of time.The reason this is important is because total CAC reflect both sales and marketing. If marketing delivers poor quality leads, then it may a lot more for sales to weed through those leads and win customers. If CAC continues to rise, maybe you’re spending too much on marketing, or too little on sales. But if you’re not measuring it all, how can it be improved? Determine this number as set a future goal.With inbound marketing you are going to have greater visibility on your sales pipeline and be able to better predict future revenues, and therefore make better decisions on staffing for sales and marketing
- 2. Marketing as a percentage of CAC. Volpe’s article said that for a company that does mostly outside sales with a long and complicated sales cycle, M%-CAC might be only 10-20% . For companies that have an inside sales team and a less complicated sales process, M%-CAC might be more like 20-50% . And for companies that have a low cost and simpler sales cycle where sales are somewhat humanless, the M%-CAC might be more like 60-90% .To get buy-in from your management team, it could be very helpful to identify what sales process you have and think about these numbers. If you have a long and complicated sales process don’t compare you budget to a company with a simpler sales process. But just talking about it, will steer the conversation in the right direction and put the focus on metrics that will truly matter in the future.
- 2. Marketing as a percentage of CAC. Volpe’s article said that for a company that does mostly outside sales with a long and complicated sales cycle, M%-CAC might be only 10-20% . For companies that have an inside sales team and a less complicated sales process, M%-CAC might be more like 20-50% . And for companies that have a low cost and simpler sales cycle where sales are somewhat humanless, the M%-CAC might be more like 60-90% .To get buy-in from your management team, it could be very helpful to identify what sales process you have and think about these numbers. If you have a long and complicated sales process don’t compare your budget to a company with a simpler sales process. But just talking about it, will steer the conversation in the right direction and put the focus on metrics that will truly matter in the future.Inbound marketing is a great fit for a long, complex sales process. What’s your current percentage. If it’s high you might be spending your budget in places that aren’t working. If it’s low, you may be passing along poor quality leads, or not enough leads to the sales team.
- 3. Ratio of customer lifetime value to CACFor companies that have a recurring revenue stream from their customers -- or even any way for customers to make a repeat purchase -- you need to estimate the current value of a customer and compare that to what you spent to acquire that new customer.
- Once you have the LTV and the CAC, you compute the ratio of the two. If it cost you $100,000 to acquire this customer with an LTV of $437,500, then your LTV:CAC is 4.4 to 1. For growing companies, most investors and board members want this ratio to be greater than 3X; a higher ratio means your Sales and Marketing have a higher ROI. Higher is not always better though ; when the ratio is too high, you might want to spend more on Sales and Marketing to grow faster, because you are restraining your growth by under-spending, and making life easy for your competition.
- Once you have the LTV and the CAC, you compute the ratio of the two. If it cost you $100,000 to acquire this customer with an LTV of $437,500, then your LTV:CAC is 4.4 to 1. For growing companies, most investors and board members want this ratio to be greater than 3X; a higher ratio means your Sales and Marketing have a higher ROI. Higher is not always better though ; when the ratio is too high, you might want to spend more on Sales and Marketing to grow faster, because you are restraining your growth by under-spending, and making life easy for your competition.
- Now, an important question to ask yourself is “what does success look like?”Based on your business goals, we need to establish key performance indicators for marketing, then set goals for continuously improving them.Here’s our inbound marketing scorecard. It’s a month by month assessment of KPIs with targets shown in white and actual data in color. Green indicates that we have met the target for that month and red when we don’t meet the target. In this case we are tracking some basic online marketing KPIs, traffic, contacts (or leads) and visit-to-lead conversion rates at the top of the funnel. At the end of the month we sit down with stakeholders and discuss results. If KPIs are in the red, we figure out how to improve performance next month.
- Remembering that Inbound Marketing is not a marketing campaign; it’s a methodology that is a different approach that addresses a different part of the buying cycle and sales pipeline.Here is an example to show how they are different approaches to the buying cycle.
- OK, now that I’ve told you what NOT to do, let’s talk some ideas that could work and help you get that buy-in from your management team.To begin, we’re going to assume that you have someone on your team like the CMO, VP of marketing or Sales, who DOES want to do this. They have already done their homework and believes in the impact of inbound marketing. You have at least one advocate, but that won’t be enough if you want to get funding and expect to successfully launch the program.
- You know you have to go to management and you need their support. Whether in-house or outsourced you will need A Crew to make things happen and keep the machine running.
- What does the crew, our inbound marketing team look like?You need leaders, creative types, geeks and socializers. If you had to hire someone for each of these categories you could look at data published for the average salary for each of these positions in your geographic area to get a pretty accurate number. But to show a simple example, let’s assume that each position, at a minimum, costs $6,000/month, including wages, payroll taxes, and benefits. And this is probably a low estimate. These 6 positions would cost $36,000/month, or slightly more than $400,000 in annual payroll.Can one person do several of these jobs? Well, maybe, but certainly not all of them, and probably not any of them well if their efforts are too diluted.It is all about talent. Without talent, or you aren’t going to get very far. But let’s assume that you can cover half of these roles with existing staff. Then the cost is = still $36,000/month, but the additional staff or outsourced resources are ½ of that, or $18,000/month, slightly over $200k per year. Over the next 12 months you need to show a return on that investment.Here’s a hint - A large majority of the time, what we have experienced is that many companies say they really need help with Content first – they don’t have extra bandwidth for copywriting, designing and publishing new content. And if they did, they still need strategy & project management, that’s the 2nd most requested resource, And 3rd, would be help with the technical side of marketing automation, lead management and lead scoring and reporting. When you spend your budget, those might be the first three areas in which you focus.
- But there is more you need to consider from the very beginning. Who else needs to be involved? What we have found is that having the team in place is great, but to really have things take off quickly you need a commitment from other folks inside the organization, or you won’t be able to create the quality content that is needed.You need an experienced product manager who can tell your story to the writers for downloads, blog posts and videos.You need to involve your sales teams to share information about the common reasons people buy – or don’t buy from you. Why would they turn to one of your competitors to purchase instead of from you? If you product costs more, create content about why. If your delivery is slower, create content to talk about how the quality is worth the wait.Other commonly overlooked resources that will be essential for success, are legal and regulatory staff. Without timely approval of content you’re not going to get the results. Inbound marketing is about publishing great, non-product centric content to educate and help the buyer. But up until recently many larger companies have legal and regulatory teams that are used to reviewing Ad campaign copy, which is totally different. We have seen this approval process range between a few weeks to a few months. That won’t work well with inbound marketing. These legal teams need to be educated as well as to why and how this content is being created. Set a goal of having an approval process be no more than 2 weeks. And when calculating the costs for inbound marketing, estimated the time and cost found these reviews. It’s not free. If you budget is $400k per year for your inbound marketing team, ask management for the budget you should include for these reviews and approvals. Be proactive in setting a realistic costs for legal and regulatory, and then you’re more likely to get their buy-in the fast response, because you are no longer asking for a favor. You will have already set their expectations, and the money for their services is in the budget and ROI calculations.
- Here’s a recent example of how all of this works.One of our clients is a dental manufacturer. They wanted to promote a brand new product that helps dentists prepare teeth for root canals faster and with fewer problems. Pretty sexy stuff.There are only about 150,000 practicing dentists in the U.S., so we had a limited market to work with, and these guys get bombarded with marketing content every day.So what we did was to appeal to these tech-savvy folks with technology and economics in a 3-page download. Here’s the latest technology for root canals you may not have heard of.No sales pitch, and just a short form to fill out to get it.
- We promoted the download with calls-to-action on the website and blog, blogged about the technology, place promoted posts on Facebook and placed banner ads in leading dental journals that clicked through to a microsite about the technology.
- Once the campaign was launched, we monitored all of the channels to see how well we were doing.On the left you see the overall impact of the campaign on traffic and leads on a daily basis during the month it was launched.And on the right, you can monitor the different channels during the campaign – shown here in green is organic search traffic, yellow is email, red is paid search and blue is direct traffic.
- In this case the campaign had a pretty dramatic impact, with a 42% increase in traffic and over 500% increase in leads in a single month.So even with a fairly limited market and a pretty dry subject, it’s possible to achieve outstanding results with good content and a smart marketing strategy.We’ll talk about converting those leads into customers shortly.
- Going back to our dental campaign, now what we’re doing is automatically enrolling leads in a lead nurturing campaign.In this case every 5 business days we send them something new and more in-depth, but still relevant to the product campaign.We’re getting progressively more product-centric with each email and inviting our leads to learn more. We’re also asking our leads to provide a little more information for each download step, but the sign-up form remains short.How does that work?
- Now let’s take a look at our dental campaign a month later since we started lead nurturing.In addition to adding a lot of new leads into the pipeline, we’ve successfully moved them forward.Our lead lifecycle KPI’s are showing nice increases as well, with a 283% increase in marketing qualified leads631 new sales qualified leads421 new demo requests55 new customersAnd about $400,000 worth of new revenue.This number has already exceeded the total revenue from digital marketing for all of 2012.
- I’ll end on that note, and please feel free to follow up with me at any time by emailing me or giving me a call (my phone number is one these fliers we handed out – if you don’t have one please see me after the talk) and please check out our premium content examples at kunocreative.com/executives. We don’t even require you to sign up for anything there, so have at it.
- I thank you for your attention, and with that I’ll open up the floor for any questions.