Know What You Want, and Know How (and when) To Get It!

Posted by Mary Coombs on May 22,2014

For years in another iteration of Coombs Marketing, we worked with Rich Caldwell, CEO of the Planned Success Institute.The baseline of our work was around knowing what we want, and knowing how to get it. Simple right? Not so much!  It's really about having a sound goal and a measureable strategy to reach it.      

cheetahSo, this week alone, I have talked to a couple of clients who really want what inbound marketing and its analytical data have to offer, but are unsure of when they want to commit to closing the deal. 

By coincidence I read a great article entitled,  Why Inbound Marketing Should Be A Priority For Your Company This Week. In the article, author, Dan Tyre writes these reasons to get what you want today:

1. You want to drive leads in the short term and the long term. 

Realistically, it takes some time to ramp up, drive qualified buyers and then harvest online leads. If you start this week, you are going to need a 30-90 day ramp to get results.

It can work more quickly if you put in more work up front, but if you start the last week in May, your lead stream is going to start in earnest sometime in August.

If you have a 90-day sales cycle, that means that if you wait a week, you are essentially missing out on 1/2 of 2014.

2. Inbound Marketing is a zero-sum game.  

In traditional marketing, if you wait two months to do a mass mailing, it has no specific impact to you or your prospect. With inbound marketing, if you wait two months, you give your competition (who may be ahead of you today) 60 more days to optimize their site so it will be more difficult and potentially more expensive to get higher rankings. 

3. Inbound Marketing is growing like crazy. 

Lots of people are waking up to the fact that utilizing 21st century web techniques, you can drive more leads.

It moves like a cheetah ready to strike. Waiting 60 days means you are competing with 100,000 more blogs and 500,000 more blog articles. Waiting a few months means you compete with more people.

4. Your customers are back from vacation next week and they are ready to buy. 

They need the information now, not when you are ready to publish it.

5. Social media is moving like a fast dog after a meat truck. 

Only 1% of companies in North America are using social media for driving leads. Start today and get first mover advantage. Start in August and you run the risk of being the fourth company in your industry to try to compete for the same eyeballs.

As a fellow inbound marketer, Ginny Soskey stated in a HubSpot blog, "The best inbound marketers I know can extract valuable data from the fluff and use it to make great decisions for the business. Just getting your hands on the data isn't enough -- you need to be able to use those numbers to fuel actionable plans so you can turn around dismal performance (or turn good performance into stellar performance)."

This was great advice and worth passing along again.  Knowing what you want is one thing, but knowing how to get it is priceless, as Visa says.  So if you know you want to make your digital assets work for you and give you a return on investment, and you know you want to capture online leads, now you know how to get them. So start your Inbound Marketing TODAY!

Want to learn more about the essentials of inbound marketing?  Download this free e-book:  

  Download Now!

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Learn the 8 essential steps to internet marketing success by downloading this free ebook:

  • Defining a keyword strategy
  • Optimizing your website to get found
  • Creating blog & other marketing content
  • Promoting content & participating in social media
  • Converting site visitors into leads
  • Nurturing leads with targeted messages
  • Optimizing your marketing for mobile
  • Analyzing & refining strategies

Download the ebook to get started.

 

For more information about inbound marketing and capturing leads online, check out these blog posts:

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Topics: Inbound Marketing