ou're also educating and engaging your existing customer base. In the age of the marketing flywheel, your existing customers shouldn't be forgotten. By using inbound for repeat engagement, you'll not only grow net-new revenue, but also increase expansion revenue from your existing customer base.
Goal Setting
Unlike direct tactics such as PPC, it can be hard to calculate your inbound marketing ROI, so it's incredibly important to have clear goals at the start of any inbound program. For B2B companies, especially those physician database with an inside sales team, it's best to calculate your marketing goals by working backward from your revenue goals to determine marketing's responsibilities.
Data from Bizible has shown the primary metric for B2B marketing success today is the number of opportunities sourced. So, even if sourcing opportunities is the end goal, it's important to realize that content marketing and SEO take time to build. One of my favorite illustrations of this is from SEO Moz, highlighting the "Gap of Dissapointment."
Once you're through that gap, content can provide lasting and compounding returns on your investment in a way that no other marketing channel or tactic can.
The point being, if you're investing in inbound, make sure you give yourself enough time to reap the fruits of your labors. It will take time, but once it pays off, it pays off big. And if it helps, you can keep these statistics in mind while you push through the gap:
Companies with 30 or more landing pages generate 7 times more leads than those with fewer than 10
Companies that blog 15 or more times per month get 5 times more traffic than companies who do not blog
Companies that have more than 52 blog posts see an increase of leads by 77 percent
