How Long Will it Take to See Results from Inbound Marketing?

Before we can answer this question, we need to know what the status of your online marketing is as of today. Inbound marketing results depend on what you have accomplished, the tools you are using, and the results from your current efforts. Because every company, marketing team, and sales team is different, we will see completely different results at various paces.

Related Blog: Why Inbound Marketing and Growth-Driven Design?

In the spirit of answering the question, “How long does it take to see results from inbound efforts?,” we are going to separate companies in three groups. Identify yourself as one of these three groups and we will share with you a few actionable next steps to growth and give you an idea of about how long it may take to see results from these efforts.

 Group #1: - The Overachievers

What best describes you?

You have been working on your online marketing strategies for years, gone through multiple marketing managers, and have thought on multiple occasions that there has to be a better way to do things. You may have started seeing results from certain tactics that you have applied, doubled down on them, and over time have started to rely heavily on those specific tactics. One of those tactics may have been Google Adwords (Pay-Per-Click), which allows you to get website traffic from visitors that are already interested in what your business has to offer and have a higher probability of converting into customers. You discovered inbound marketing a couple of years ago, started blogging, and created great content to try and get as many people as possible to your website from Google, PPC, and social media. You thought that you had tried it all until you found an extremely useful tool that helped you with each one of these efforts, HubSpot.

What are you doing currently?

You are probably blogging frequently, already set up a few workflows, created automated email responses, and have a few downloadable content offers. You most likely are spending a lot of money on PPC and other advertising opportunities to bring as many people as possible to the website.

What are your challenges?

You get thousands of people to your website through PPC, through organic Google searches, and through your social efforts. Even though many of those visitors convert into leads, you have not seen an increase in sales.

Another possibility is that you have seen an increase in sales from these efforts, but have not had a consistent strategy. You are relying on these tactics that cost you a lot of time and money, and the return on investment is not what you expected. We have seen customers in this situation spend countless hours on content creation and/or more than $15k on online paid advertising (PPC and Facebook Ads) without seeing the returns.

How long will it take to see results from inbound efforts:

If you are an overachiever, you should see results from inbound efforts right away. A few optimizations of your current efforts produce instantaneous results and surprisingly enough, you might already have money waiting for you in your CRM. If you have been working hard to generate leads and have seen some success, the first step is to leverage your current lead base and see what potential opportunities lie there.

Your best bet will be to work with an experienced agency that can help you optimize your efforts and start closing customers right away. Implement a sales process and then make sure that the inbound machine continues to run over time, attracting the right visitors, converting them into leads, and moving those leads through the funnel with educational content that makes your sales team’s jobs easier over time.

What to do next?

Audit + Refine Strategy:

First of all, audit, audit, audit. The best way to find opportunities is to start analyzing what is happening, what is (and isn’t) working, where the biggest possibility of success is with the lowest amount of work, and where the biggest returns are.

If you are spending $15k per month on PPC, countless hours on a content and SEO strategy, getting thousands of visitors onto your website, and have a 1 to 2% visitor to lead conversion rate, then that is your first opportunity. Review what kind of leads you are getting, evaluate  those leads, and review which ones are opportunities that could be converted into customers right away. This means money for you within just days.

PRO TIP: 

If you are using HubSpot, it is easy to create a customized view of leads with the right criteria, get your sales team to call those people today, and turn them into opportunities. You can also implement Lead Scoring to assign a score to leads who are taking the actions that you think indicate a highly engaged lead who could be ready to talk to your sales team.

Conversion Optimization:

If your website is getting thousands of visitors and you have great content offers to help them convert into leads, make sure you implement Calls-to-Action that send them to the correct landing pages that correlate with their actions on the website and their interests. You can also implement HubSpot Lead Flows that are customized depending on the website page to entice people to convert on corresponding offers. These simple conversion optimization tactics can improve your conversion rate in just weeks.

PRO TIP:

Customize your lead flows to promote an offer that relates to the specific page that visitors are on. For example, if you are on a specific product page and you have a guide that describes the installation of that product, create a lead flow to pop up on that page. This is an easy way to convert visitors into leads by making relevant conversion opportunities readily available as they browse your site.  

Related Blog: HubSpot Lead Flow Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Experiment: Segmented vs. Generic

PPC Optimization

While auditing, review all of the marketing activities that are being done, especially the ones that you are heavily investing time and/or money into. These activities are probably the ones that worked at a certain point and were doubled down on to get more results in the beginning. A great example of these overused tactics is spending a large amount of money on PPC advertising. Optimize these activities to reduce costs and time while all other efforts are also being optimized on the website.

PRO TIP:

PPC campaigns are usually poorly optimized. Finding out what works and what does not work will take time. When PPC does work, most companies decide to double the budget, expecting that the results will also double. We have also seen companies double their budget because it was not working. This way, a $3k budget could easily turn into a $10k budget in a matter of months. Instead, focus on optimizing for results instead of keywords. The HubSpot Ads Add-on tracks which keywords and messages bring more visits, convert more leads, and close more customers. Using this feature allows you to see which keywords and ads you should be focusing your money on. Over time, you should reduce your budget and apply that money to other efforts.

Conversational Marketing and Sales:

If you are getting thousands of visits per month to your website, there is a likely chance that you have people that are ready to have conversations with you. Many may not call you or complete a form, but they might be more willing to chat with a bot on your website without pressure. The best way to take advantage of this is to implement conversations through helpful chatbots. Chatbots can greet visitors on your website and answer a series of specific questions. As soon as a visitor is qualified, they can be sent to an offer or speak directly with one of your salespeople. The more conversations you have with your potential customers at the right time, the more business you will close. To create advanced chatbots we use Drift, which integrates into HubSpot.

PRO TIP:

Make sure you program chatbots to be as specific as possible. The first question is crucial to get the conversation going. If you go too generic with your questions you can lose a big percentage of people. For this reason, we recommend having different conversations for different pages. This way, you will not ask the same questions on the home page as in a pricing page where they probably have questions about pricing or the product itself. Remember, it is always better to help first and sell later.  

Create a Sales Process:

Most companies have a sales team or salespeople, but lack a sales process. Without a sales process and a defined CRM to manage your lead base, your sales team will only rely on personal experience and will only act on what is right in front of them, missing many opportunities along the way. Creating a process that defines what to do during each stage of the sales process, how to mine data to find opportunities, and how to follow up and engage with leads, will accelerate your growth.

PRO TIP:

Implement HubSpot’s free CRM and define your lead scoring process to know when to send leads from marketing to sales. Make sure that there is also a well-defined sales process with deal stages implemented into the tool. The more your sales team uses the CRM, the more data you can gather about activities that yield the most ROI. This gives you a full picture of how your business is generating more business online thanks to the work put in by both your sales and marketing teams. 

Group #2: - The busy bees

What best describes you?

You have been doing inbound for a while, you have your website, you blog regularly, you post on social media, you have done some SEO work, and you have implemented a few forms on your website to get people to contact you. You get some visits on your website from these efforts and they seem to be growing over time.

What are you doing currently?

You probably manage your company's PR efforts, maintain the website, and run offline marketing campaigns. You spend a lot of time on events, such as tradeshows and conventions, and trying to get the word out through branding and advertising. When you have time, you blog, but mostly about the company. Because your boss asks how your social media and website are performing, you focus your efforts on quantity versus quality. You pay attention to how many blogs you have written, or how many posts, likes, and followers you have on social media.

What are your challenges?

You don’t have enough time to do it all. Your company relies on you for branding, PR, marketing, event planning, and much more. Because you’re constrained for time, you focus on completing as much as you can for the website instead of analyzing the results of your work. You manage all of your tasks with multiple tools, making it difficult to connect your efforts and understand what is working for you, and what is not the best use of your time. Because you don’t have a defined inbound strategy, most of your content efforts are PR related or very focused on the “bottom of the funnel.” You are not attracting people at all stages of the buyer’s journey and therefore, not converting your website visitors into leads because you are focused solely on people who are ready to buy. Your efforts are not generating the success that your company needs and you know something has to change, but because you have no time, years pass with no development.

How long will it take to see results from Inbound efforts?

Working with an established website will always accelerate success. Google takes time to index your site so that you can start growing online. The longer your site has been online and the more content you have created increases the probability to rank on Google faster. Websites with an active blog that are also already ranking on Google are easier to optimize with the goal of attracting more people over time.

By implementing simple changes over time and creating a strategy for the future, you can achieve results in months, instead of having to wait years.

What to do next?

New Strategy + Video:

Working without a strategy will guarantee delayed success. Setting up a consistent content and conversion strategy with well-defined buyer personas, campaigns, and value offers will ensure a systematic path to success. To accelerate the process, while you are working on research and strategy, create videos with key members of your team and your customers. Ask your sales and support teams questions like, “What are 5 questions you get every day from prospects and customers?” These videos can then be turned into blogs and promoted right away. Get your best customers in front of the camera to explain why they love your products and services.

PRO TIP:

Upload your videos to Wistia and embed them onto your site using their player. Doing this will allow you to learn about how people are engaging with them and how you should optimize your videos over time. If your videos are great and have a high level of engagement, keep the video on your site and create a blog from the content. If they are not performing well, use only the audio and add b-roll as a way to still use the content. If nothing is usable in your video, you can turn the content into a blog. You always win if you start with video. 

 Repurposing content:

Make sure you audit your current content and find opportunities to repost and update existing blogs. Find blogs that are getting a lot of traffic and optimize them for conversions. You should also find blogs that are getting a lot of conversions and update them with more valuable content and optimize them to rank higher for specific keywords or topics.

PRO TIP: 

Reposting blogs with even minor changes can gain some renewed attention and usually allow its ranking to grow. On months that you are not able to blog enough, optimize and repost successful blogs and then promote them again on social media to increase engagement.

Content Offers: 

If you are starting from scratch with no value offers, research and evaluate who your ideal audience is and decide what deliverable adds the most value to your ideal customer’s buying process. This value may be a guide or checklist, or it could be access to a monthly webinar you host. Whatever the offer, the most important thing is to make sure you’re adding as much value as possible.

If you’re in a position where you’ve had content offers on your site for long enough to analyze the performance of them, then you could begin thinking about how you can make that content work better for you. Maybe you have a content offer that is of value, but is not converting at a high rate. Ungate that piece of content and allow Google to crawl your value offer, increasing organic search ability and exposure. You can still gate a PDF version of that content for those  who prefer that format. 

PRO TIP:

Pillar pages should focus broadly on one keyword topic. The goal is to capture a small slice of a very high search volume pie.

Email Marketing & Automation:

One of your main priorities should be to build an email list with the new leads that are coming to your website at all stages of the buyer’s journey. Automate email responses with workflows to entice these leads to come back and to engage with more content on your website. Over time, you can create email campaigns targeted to the specific needs and the intent of your leads and help move them through the funnel.

PRO TIP:

Use Seventh Sense to learn from each email you send. This tool will give you the most probable time that people will open and engage with your emails. This allows you to customize user experience, grow your opening and click-through-rates, and ultimately, grow your conversions.  

Group #3: - The beginners

What best describes you?

You know you need to use your website in order for your business to grow, but you don’t know how. You have heard of SEO, but have not heard many success stories from it lately. You have probably had some bad experiences with unprofessional website designers and SEO companies who did not provide the results that you had hoped for.

What are you doing currently?

You have a website, have started using social media, have some sort of an SEO strategy in place and you come up with keywords on Google or Google local, but you do not see business coming in organically from the internet.

What are your challenges?

The phone is not ringing like it used to and your competitors are getting most of their growth from their website. You know that your website should bring you business, but you don’t know what to do. Maybe you have heard of blogging, inbound, and HubSpot, but don’t know where the best place is to start. Most agencies charge a lot of money compared to what you are used to investing in marketing efforts, so you are afraid to make a commitment.

How long will it take to see results from inbound efforts:

If you're new to inbound marketing, you may be unsure of how long it takes to see results. Inbound marketing requires a strategy, a well-established website, and valuable content to work. If you are a beginner, it will take more time; however, the long-term results are what makes it all worthwhile. The answer to how long inbound marketing results take is not a certain number of days or weeks, but instead, it truly depends on a number of variables. Make sure you start working on your website, content, and SEO to get everything ready for the necessary next steps before you start working with an agency. If you are already established on the internet and your website is getting visits, there are more advanced tactics that agencies can help you with to accelerate success.

83.9% of companies using inbound marketing increased leads within 7 months

HubSpot statistics show that not only does inbound marketing work, it works within the first year! Most companies credit their number one reason for an increase of leads to inbound marketing tactics like landing pages and calls-to-action, with blogging coming in second place.

What to do next?

Preparation:

If you've already established the foundation of your company, you can start to delve into your marketing strategy. Working with an inbound marketing agency helps, but even if you're doing it yourself you need to focus on a few preliminary steps:

• Perform keyword research
• Review your competition
• Establish smart goals
• Create Buyer Personas
• Get your website ready to grow

Creating Content:

Your preparation stage can last anywhere from 1-2 months depending on the size and industry of your company and how prepared/equipped your marketing department is. After the preparation stage, your focus should be on creating great content in the form of blogs, content offers, and campaigns, which you will then analyze the success of.

If your company is completely on board and starts getting content out immediately, you'll see faster results than if you're hesitant to start or if your content has to go through many stages of approval. Blogging is one of the most important things that you can do to increase traffic to your website. It champions as the #1 method for increasing traffic, with SEO in second place (HubSpot). Blogging creates new, fresh content that drives potential customers to your business.

Although inbound marketing may not provide you with instant results, when you do start seeing more leads and traffic, they will only continue to grow from there.

PRO TIP:

Set a SMART goal for your blogs and make sure it is attainable. If you don’t, you will find yourself not having enough time and feeling bad about it. Start with one blog per week.

SEO + Local SEO: (Search Engine Optimization):

SEO and Local SEO will help your website come up on the first page of Google when people are searching with a specific intent that matches what your business offers. Content is, of course, the first thing that you should focus on when trying to get your website to rank. Spend time understanding what your ideal customers are looking for, what questions they have, and help them by creating and offering engaging content. If content is great for people, it will be great for Google.

If your business focuses on a local customer base, ensure that your information is consistent on all online directories (citations), and encourage your customers to leave reviews so that you increase your local ranking.

PRO TIP:

Use a tool like MOZ to increase your SEO over time. Moz analyzes your website and tells you what needs to be improved and what to do next.

Google Paid Ads - Pay-Per-Click (PPC):

Google Adwords allows you to create ads that will come up when people search for specific keywords. We never recommend investing heavily in PPC in the beginning to increase traffic to a new website. With that said, if there is a solid strategy, great content being produced, and offers that the visitors can take advantage of to convert into leads, this tactic could work. Usually we recommend PPC to compliment your inbound strategy once things are underway.

PRO TIP:

Connect your Google Adwords campaign to the HubSpot Ads Add-on to understand which keywords are actually bringing leads and customers over time. Then move money to these keywords to get the most for your budget.

As you can see, obtaining results from inbound could take days, months or more than a year. Results depend on your current status and how much you are willing to change your processes and strategy and how much you are willing to dedicate internal resources to focus on what is important. No matter where you are, having an inbound strategy WORKS and we have been proving this for years. Click here to read some of our case studies.

If you'd like to learn more about inbound marketing, contact us today and get a free inbound marketing assessment.