We have preached the benefits of inbound marketing and content creation on this blog before. In my opinion, everybody should love inbound marketing. In fact, even your CFO should love inbound marketing.
Actually, especially your CFO.
I know that the CFO of an organization seems like an odd choice on the surface when it comes to loving a marketing strategy, but follow me on this one.
As a marketing agency we tend to approach inbound marketing from a marketing or sales perspective, but today I wanted to talk about it from a more bottom line approach. Something that most accounting people and CFO’s seem to have a great deal of interest for some reason. Weird, right?
As a real quick definition borrowed from our friends at HubSpot “Inbound marketing is about using marketing to bring potential customers to you, rather than having your marketing efforts fight for their attention.”
While there is always expense associated with marketing whether it is in opportunity cost or capital, inbound marketing gives a great return on your investment.
Let’s look at a few reasons why.
Evergreen: Inbound marketing is built around content creation. Any content that your marketing team creates is for all intents and purposes evergreen. It lasts forever.
That makes it different from other marketing tactics like trade shows or PPC, which are limited by time period or budget. When you pay with either time or money for a piece of content you are creating something that is valuable for a much longer time and continues generating leads.
In fact, content can get more valuable as it accrues more links back to it and more mentions on social media.
Recyclable: Content can also be recycled, which means instead of starting from square one you can reuse it. For instance, if you start with a video you can then change it a bit and have a whitepaper, ebook or case study, then an infographic. That means that you don’t have to pay for brand new content every time. You can take an older piece of content, recondition and refresh it, and have something that attracts new leads saving money in the process.
Closing: Your company probably makes more money when sales is closing sales, correct? If sales is prospecting, or god forbid cold calling, isn’t that a huge waste of resources? If sales has a valuable pipeline of MQL (marketing qualified leads) that means that theoretically your sales teams should be making more sales.
If you institute an inbound marketing strategy, your marketing team can toss highly qualified leads over to sales to pursue. That means that sales is spending more of their time closing sales rather than chasing down leads.
Want to learn more? Get our Guide to the 6 Marketing Metrics Your CEO Cares About.