Effective Marketing Solutions: Start With an Inbound Assessment

Providing Effective Marketing Solutions: Start With An Inbound Assessment

– The Inbound Marketing Process can be difficult to understand when applying it beyond just basic web design, social media pages, and blog posts. Even if a prospective client has those three things, it doesn’t necessarily mean they have a complete grasp on?inbound marketing solutions. This is where an inbound marketing agency comes to the rescue to position clients for future success.

Effective Marketing Solutions: The Onboarding Process

In a perfect world, the client will come to an agency with a need and the agency will help address and provide marketing solutions. However, many client-agency relationships have soured because expectations were not laid out during the onboarding process. The prospect knows they need help or they wouldn’t be approaching an inbound marketing agency. Yet, they don’t necessarily know what they need to solve their marketing problems.

That’s o.k.

To combat this, the initial step in the process should be conducting a proper?inbound marketing assessment?so that not only the agency knows what it needs to focus on, but also so the client understands specifically what is going to be done to solve their marketing problems.

An inbound marketing assessment should include a simple score of the prospect’s existing website and inbound efforts. This can be done through a basic?website grader. The grader will gauge online marketing efforts on a scale of 1-100 so the client can see how effective their own efforts have been up to that point. This score reveals the amount of work that needs to be put in, but does not go into specifics.

This is where the next step comes into play: the in-depth inbound marketing assessment. This should be a detailed report that probes what the prospect currently does and eventually wants. The assessment should ask questions like:

What are your business goals?
What are your revenue goals?
Do you have established social media profiles?
Have you identified personas for your business?
Do you know their buying cycle?
Do you know what your target keywords are?
Are you receiving web leads?
What links can you use to boost SEO and search rankings?
How much time do you dedicate to finding marketing solutions?
Do you offer forms on your website that capture lead information?
Do you have a blog?
Do you list benefits on landing pages?
Do you include Calls-to-Action on your pages?
Do you review your analytics?

These questions help an agency obtain valuable data and insight into the “real” inbound marketing problems. It will ultimately help both sides understand where exactly the current marketing program falls short and which areas require better marketing solutions.

If the prospect decides to move forward, it is important to assess how long it will take to provide inbound marketing solutions and what the ROI will be.

Set Up For Success: Assess, Strategize, and Solve

The inbound marketing assessment will identify goals, opportunities, threats, timelines and budgets. The assessment also poses as a perfect opportunity to evaluate whether this client is in it for the long haul. For example, if the client wants social media pages, make sure their expectations don’t end at just creating the profiles. This will not meet any long-term goals and will leave both sides dissatisfied.

Eventually every successful organization will schedule, plan and introduce an ongoing inbound plan that Attracts, Engages, and Converts?Visitors and fans over a period of time.

The Inbound Marketing Assessment is vital in understanding existing marketing efforts and goes hand-in-hand with providing inbound marketing solutions that meet the bottom line.

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