We frequently discuss the merits of inbound marketing; I won’t waste your time in this post defining it again. While there is clear evidence that inbound marketing is growing in popularity among marketers, I’m convinced that it has the potential to rock your world.
If you’ve been doing marketing and advertising for a long time (20+ years), or your notion of marketing is still advertising via yellow pages, trade journals, sales flyers, billboards, and radio spots, I likely have some work to do to convince you that you’re missing out on a life-changing opportunity. Here goes:
Our Success with Inbound Marketing
For the better part of the last couple of decades, 30dps has been a full-service branding, marketing, and advertising agency. In that capacity, we’ve been proud to serve clients not only across the state of Colorado, but from coast to coast as well, providing a full cadre of services. While our focus has consistently been on branding and website design, we had not really committed to inbound marketing (and content marketing) for ourselves, or as a focus of our service offering. By early 2015, with solid-paying long-time clients in hand, our complacency had resulted in us becoming virtually invisible to search engines. When we recently parted ways with some of our larger clients, you could almost hear the proverbial crickets chirping, and we immediately started planning how we would kick off our own marketing and advertising efforts. Ironically (and sadly), our first instinct was to find a quick fix, so (of course) we launched a direct mail campaign. Shocker… it produced nada.
So in early 2015, we took the plunge with HubSpot, and committed to our own inbound marketing. We started by launching our first substantial redesign of our website in 15 years. And before the redesign was even complete, we started producing content—content we believed would be truly valuable to our prospective and existing clients. Now when I say we started producing content, I mean we started CRANKING out content like we’d never done before. Instead of talking about ourselves, we started sharing all of the things we’d learned over the last twenty years with the goal of genuinely trying to help our audience.
Now I’d love to tell you that immediately the phone began to ring. However, the truth is, aside from landing our first new client within 12 hours of the new website launch (true story), for the most part, we could still hear those darned crickets. But we were determined to sustain our efforts, believing that inbound marketing and a consistent effort to produce valuable content would ultimately change our world. Well, within six months we were no longer invisible, and we actually had more active leads than we had ever had at one time. But as exciting as it all was, contracts were very slow in the signing, and it was tempting to back off our inbound efforts, and try outbound again. Fortunately, our commitment held, we continued to crank out fresh content, and focused on hitting social harder than ever before.
While we would still be delighted to take on (lots of) new clients, in the last year, business has steadily increased—even those pesky drawn-out contracts eventually got signed. Ask me if I think we could be where we are today had we not committed to inbound marketing and you’re likely to hear a “No way!” Our search engine rankings, and virtually every other metric we hold dear, has steadily improved. We’re nowhere near done, and we still can improve in every area, but the improvement to date has been nothing short of stunning. Oh, and the crickets… haven’t heard them in months.
Better News
As exciting as our success has been since this inbound marketing agency committed to inbound marketing, the success our clients have seen is even more notable. We’ve seen increases in traffic, leads, and sales that have been nothing short of astounding. The more the client had been historically reliant on outbound/traditional marketing, the more profound the impact of committing to inbound has been. Clients that were invisible in search engines when we started now have 70+ of the most critical keywords show on page one of Google, and sometimes the majority of those are in the top 3 results of page 1. And while we certainly can't claim that everyone will see the same kinds of results, we’ve seen 30, 60, and even 80% increases in leads and sales. We’ve got clients that are setting new sales records every month!
Committing to inbound marketing has changed not only our lives, but also the lives of some of our (increasingly) biggest clients. If you’d like to experience for yourself what inbound marketing could do for your company, PLEASE fill out our contact form, and someone will be delighted to give you a call.
