What Does Inbound Marketing Cost?

This article is your ultimate guide to how much HubSpot costs and a step-by-step guide to getting started with HubSpot.

If you’ve been marketing your business through outbound marketing methods like billboards, magazine ads, and television commercials, you are used to spending thousands of dollars. Now you’ve come across inbound marketing and wondering how that fits into your strategic objectives and you are also wondering how much does it cost?

You may have seen the statistics, effectiveness and ROI of inbound marketing when executed correctly. With such great results, you are sure the cost is going to be at least triple that of outbound marketing, but what is the truth?

How much does it cost to run an effective inbound marketing campaign?

 

The True Cost of Inbound Marketing

Many factors go into how much your campaign is going to cost. Some of the factors that play a role are:

• What kind of content do you need for your campaign?
• How much content do you need?
• What infrastructure do you need to put into place before getting started?
• Are you going to do it yourself or hire an agency?

Let’s look further into the matter so you can get a feel for the real cost of your campaign.

Creating Inbound Marketing Playbook

You won’t know how you need to get somewhere if you don’t know where you are. Look at everything you have in place that can be used toward your inbound strategy. Do you have blog posts? White papers? Infographics?

Anything you have that is content related could be used toward your inbound marketing campaigns, which will decrease the money you will have to spend for persona-driven content creation.

Once you step back and take an objective assessment of your current content marketing resources, it is time to create a plan of where you want to go and how long you want to take to get there. The higher your goals are and the shorter your timeline, the more money you will have to put out. to deliver results.

This often requires a HubSpot designer, developer, copywriter and graphic designer, then you also need someone to project manage these specialists to have them work together to deliver results on schedule.

 

Creating Execution Timeline

If you start your campaign before putting a very specific plan together, your strategy won’t be much of a strategy at all. An inbound marketing campaign without the basics cemented is like building a house without a foundation.

A few things you’ll need to figure out before you get started:

• Who is your target persona?
• What are your overall goals with your inbound program?
• What is your competition doing?
• How is your SEO currently?
• What are you doing on social media? And is it effective?
• How are you creating content? And who is creating it?
• Do you have an editorial calendar in place?
• What offers do you have and what offers do you need to create?
• What is your lead nurturing plan?

 

Inbound Marketing Costs & ROI

Now that you understand a little more about inbound marketing, where you are and what you will need, it is time to get into it. If you don’t care about the quality of your blog content, you can always source your blog posts from discount sites. While they may not be readable, at least you’ll have some content in place – right? Wrong.

Content that isn’t written well can hurt your blog and brand. Not only will it make it difficult for your visitors to read the content but they won’t take you seriously if there are errors and “fluff” content. You get what you pay for when it comes to inbound marketing which is the same with everything else in life. Make sure you don’t sacrifice quality for quantity in your HubSpot campaign. It would help if you had both quality and quantity.

Cost of Strategy and Planning

Your strategy and planning can be one of the most expensive parts of your campaign. Marketing strategy consultants bring in about $72,000 per year so you can do the math on how much of their time you’re going to need.

Marketing Software

If you are doing your own implementation, you’ll need software. This software can cost anywhere from $200 a month to $1,000s a month.

Website Design Costs

You may already have a website, but if it isn’t suited to inbound, you’ll need to have a website overhaul done or a totally new site created. Web design costs can be in the $1,000s. Expect to pay $20 – $30 per hour for a qualified website designer.

Content Costs

Depending on where you source your articles from, a well-written blog post will cost you between $75 and $150. The average copywriter has a salary of $60,000 and a content marketing content is around $73,000.

Hiring an SEO Specialist

If you want an in-house SEO specialist, you are going to pay around $43,000 annually for their talents. Once everything is set up, you may not need an SEO specialist anymore, but if you plan on running paid ads, that is another story.

Social Media

If you want someone to run your social media campaign, you’ll find experienced managers online that will charge $25 – $35 an hour. It can be difficult to find these people since they are in such high demand.

 

Hiring Inbound Marketing Experts

As you tally up the costs, it can be easy to get overwhelmed with the numbers and think that an inbound marketing campaign is out of your budget at this time. The good news is that instead of paying high fees to various niche specialists, your company can hire an inbound marketing for less than the cost of one employee.

HubSpot partner agencies can save you a lot of money on HubSpot, secure you monthly payments instead of annual payments and they can also waive the $3,000 onboarding fee. Get a free HubSpot quote to see how much money you can save on HubSpot.

When you work with an inbound marketing agency, they know how to put the strategy into place quickly and have access to all of the talent that you need. If you search for talent on your own, you could spend months or even years getting the pieces in place to launch your campaign.

When it comes to delivering positive HubSpot ROI, it makes the most sense to team up with a higher level HubSpot partner agency that specializes within your specific industry. Being able to get your inbound marketing campaign launched so you can start generating leads, and closing sales will save you time, effort and money.