How much time should you expect to put into your inbound marketing? It depends on how successful you want it to be. Like everything else, you get out what you put in. Modern life is predicated on that; there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Don’t expect yourself or an agency to receive a great reward without taking enough time and making the appropriate effort. It’s all or nothing.
Get the picture? Inbound marketing takes time and a lot of work. But, oh, the rewards that come out of it…definitely worth it. It makes the difference between building a house with straw or sticks and building with bricks. We all know what happened to those first two pigs. The competition blew them away.
The amount of time needed for inbound marketing does depend somewhat on the size of your company and this isn’t to say that inbound marketing won’t work at all with less time devoted to it. This post talks about optimum time for optimum results, but even a modest amount of time spent on inbound marketing will pay dividends and be more measurable than traditional marketing. Estimate spending about 10% of your work time on inbound marketing.
Content Marketing
According to Marcus Sheridan, HubSpot Partner and all-around inbound marketing expert, content marketing alone requires least 10 hours a week to do everything right.
Where does that time go? To use blogging as an example, a good rule of thumb is to allot 90 minutes to 2 hours to produce a single blog post. This depends on the writer’s experience, how long it takes to come up with an idea, research it, write it, edit it and get it published. This should occur at least 3 times a week which adds up to 4 ½ to 6 hours.
And that is just one inbound marketing activity. There is still more to do:
- Adding content and landing pages to your website
- Researching and tracking keywords
- Producing white papers, e-books, video & case studies
- Producing video
- Periodic content audits
- Creating emails
Ten hours is starting to look inadequate, isn’t it? And this is just for content marketing.
Social Media Marketing
Chris Brogan, a leading social media marketer, estimates that 2 hours per day (yes, per day) is the minimum needed to do social media marketing well. Strictly speaking, video and blogging are forms of social media as well, meaning content marketing and social media marketing overlap a bit.
Supporting that estimate is a study by the Social Media Examiner in 2011 that directly correlates time devoted to social media marketing with sales success; the more time spent, the higher sales went. And while more experienced marketers did more blogging and video (which takes significantly more time but is more successful) time spent with the social networks is also necessary.
Social networks require research, monitoring, and engagement. You need to know which network your ideal customer uses most. You need to “listen” for mentions of your company, your products and services and your competitors. And you must also study marketing metrics for the networks as well.
Lead Generation and Nurturing
Again, with some overlap with content marketing, generating and nurturing leads is another tactic of inbound marketing that requires time and resources. Lead nurturing is an ongoing process of engaging with a lead from the first contact through the sale. Much of this is done through email marketing, which has many digital tools to help automate the process.
Time will be needed to write separate emails to go with each landing page and every step in the funnel and buying cycle. Depending on the industry, lead nurturing can take months and contain a certain amount of backtracking.
Pay per Click (PPC)
Pay per click takes time to learn to do well and requires planning and strategy. It integrates well with SEO since it is based on keywords. Again, there are digital tools to help with changing bids and determining number of showings per lead, but monitoring and maintenance are still required.
Metrics
For everything there is a KPI and a metric to analyze to make sure your marketing efforts are as optimal as possible. This takes daily attention to be the most effective. A/B testing, changes in content, landing pages, PPC, and other practices and tactics can be turned on a dime in the digital world and, in order to keep up with you competitors, that means you need to set aside time to take care of this.
Continuing Education
Nothing is static, certainly not marketing practices. Marketing has been turned on its head in the past decade and practices continue to change to accommodate new social networks, technology and customer preference.
You need to take the time to keep up with changes, learn how to use marketing software to its fullest extent, plus keep up with changes in your own industry. Digital tools arrive on the scene every day and your marketing application gets updated with new features that require you to slow down and learn about it.
Your Challenge
It’s hard to think about the amount of time each business activity takes when it seems like everything needs to be done right now and, for many businesses, upper management wants instant results. If you are a small business you may already feel snowed under with work.
But if you compare the return on investment of inbound marketing with that of traditional marketing you will see that you are spending less money per lead acquisition while building customer lifetime value more easily than before. Whenever you find yourself wanting to throw something together just to get it online, stop and consider whether you will spend more time in the long run building your customer base with inadequate content and marketing practices.
Much of the time needed for inbound marketing is up front with content development and setting up processes. But if you do it right and maintain it on a regular basis, you can reap the wild whirlwind of inbound marketing while your competition blows in the wind.
