How long before I see results from inbound marketing?

The short answer: within the first 12 months. But we think you are a bit more proactive and want to know how you can have an influence on how quickly things start to happen. So we kept writing.

Preparations

It can be tempting to just throw yourself at something new. You are fed up with the same old, same old, and you know it does not provide you with results. You want a change, and you want it now. But if you don’t take the time to do some fundamental planning, you risk not getting the most out of your inbound marketing either.

It is similar to when you want to lose weight. You sign up to the gym, buy juices, invest in a fit bit and announce to all your friends and family that starting Monday, you will be a new human.

Then Monday comes, and you have to work late, the kids have football practice and you have to swing by your mother-in-law with the casserole you borrowed. But Tuesday, Tuesday will be your day.

Night to Tuesday you sleep badly after a stressful day. As 4 pm comes around you just want to go home and relax. Well, there’s always tomorrow. And so it goes, a week passes without you stepping a foot into the gym, made a single juice or taken those 10 000 steps you set as a goal each day.

Getting started with inbound marketing is similar. If you don’t decide to create a solid foundation before you get started, it is easy to spend time and resources on the wrong things. All of the sudden, 6 months have passed and the blog has no new posts, there are no new leads relevant to your business, and everyone has gone back to their old ways.

Before you get started, we recommend that you take the time to warm up by:

• Creating personas
• Creating and populating a publishing calendar
• Delegating the responsibility for writing content

Planning can take as long or as short a time you want it to. In Avidly Norway we tend to estimate a “pre-project” lasting around 2 months. In this time, we will amongst other things go through:

• Mapping the buyer’s journey for your customers
• Do a technical setup of HubSpot.
• Get to know your industry and competition
• Produce content for the first month
• Create campaigns, landing pages and workflows for marketing automation
• Analyse your current website to see if there are simple changes that can be made to turn it into a leads machine
• Mapping sales processes and leads management

Within the first twelve months

When you get started with inbound marketing, there are 3 main factors that will determine how quickly you see results:

How often you publish content

Companies publishing 11+ blog posts each month get nearly three times as much traffic as companies that publish 0-1 times each month. Looking at companies publishing 16+ blog posts each month we see almost 3.5 times as much traffic, as for companies publishing 0-4 blog posts each month.

Maybe you don’t have time to write 4 blog post each week, but the statistics around the amount of content is still interesting, although not more important than quality. We are not saying that all your blog posts should be long and comprehensive, but useful and informative.

Companies blogging 16+ time each month have a 4 times higher lead generation than those publishing content 0-4 times each month.

Quality of the content

The good thing about producing content that answers your prospects’ questions is that it has the potential to deliver leads long after you published it. Data from HubSpot shows that 75 % of traffic to company blogs and websites, as well as 90 % of leads, come from old content.

Spend some time talking to support and sales to identify what questions customers are asking. These are perfect topics for your blog.

Promoting the content

You might not immediately jump to the top of the search results. People won’t often find you out of the blue. Has your company just started publishing content? You can’t expect people to guess that you now have a blog and have started answering their questions.

This is why it is important to share content. Share it in social media, newsletters, send it to prospects and link to the content in relevant places on your website. Make it as easy as possible for relevant people to find the answers to all their questions.

If there is any room in the marketing budget, we recommend that you also sponsor posts in social media about your blog and any links to landing pages with downloadable content. Consider what social media your personas are active in, share your blog posts and create sponsored campaigns targeting the relevant audiences.

There are clearly several factors determining how quickly you will see results from your inbound marketing efforts. Most companies will see some results within the first 7 months and many will see great results within the first year. If you have the opportunity to produce and promote several blog posts each week, your results might come faster.