"Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs." - Peter Drucker Our eBook will explain how to reduce your marketing costs while taking some responsibility off of your back as a business owner. With this eBook, we'll introduce you to a way of marketing that's measurable, efficient, and successful.

1. Reduce Marketing Costs
with Inbound Marketing

2. “ Because its purpose is to create a
client, the business has two — and
only two — functions: marketing and
innovation. Marketing and innovation
produce results; all the rest are costs.”
–Peter Drucker

3. Marketing, Not a Cost!?
While we understand this quote by Peter
Drucker, a man whom many consider to be the
father of modern business management –
you’re still writing a check for marketing and In
the high stakes game of owning and operating a
SMB with razor-thin margins, a misallocation of
funds one year could mean bankruptcy the next.

4. Cuts By Efficiency
Marketing is undeniably important to a business’s success, and
particularly to a small business, where expansion of brand
awareness could make the difference between its life or death.
Though you can’t take money away from your marketing,
everyone can afford to perform their marketing operations more
efficiently. When you do this, you’ll cut the impact of your
marketing budget on your overall business expenditures. You
have nothing to lose!
First, why the old ways have to go…

5. What’s Changed In Marketing
Marketing has come a long way from the newspaper ads of
yesteryear.
Television ads experienced a heyday for several decades, but
with the invention of DVR, YouGov reports that 86% of television
viewers skip the commercials while watching television programs
on their DVR.[1]
Television is still one of the last remaining stalwarts of traditional
marketing, but unless you’re a big national brand, it’s too
difficult and expensive to use it effectively.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/aug/24/tv-advertising

6. Today, thanks to the internet, the
consumer is more empowered than ever.
Today’s buyers compare prices across
numerous sites and read reviews written by
their peers.
The new challenge is to cut through the noise
and reach buyers in a way that captures
attention and spreads a positive, helpful
message.

7. But that also means that the digital
world is noisier than ever.

8. The Key to Cutting Through the Noise?
It’s marketing that offers a learning
experience for everyone involved.
Marketing that feels more like a
conversation between two people and a
lot less like a sales pitch.

9. Enter Inbound Marketing!
With inbound marketing, your website
becomes a lead generation tool. The
first step is to get traffic to your site.
Actively posting quality, relevant
content to your blog will help increase
your traffic over time.

10. Now That Traffic is Increasing
You need to begin capturing information about your
visitors. You’ll want to know:
• Their names
• Email addresses
• Company name
• Other identifying information
So that you can begin to understand who they are and
how to best nurture their interest and get them closer to
becoming your next customer!

11. But How Do I Get Visitors to Give Out
That Information?

12. Advanced or Premium Content!
Advanced content can includes white papers, ebooks,
webinars, videos, check lists, cheat sheets, etc. all of
which are hidden behind landing pages which require the
visitor to enter some information in order to gain access.
No matter the format, what all pieces of advanced
content have in common is that the information is so
interesting and useful that people will give up their
contact information to get their hands on it.

13. We’re getting contact information.
Now What?

14. Now we Nurture Those Leads
Even if your advanced content is perfectly suited
to your ideal customer, you are bound to collect
quite a few leads that are not a good fit for you.
Rather than asking your sales people to follow up
on these poor fits, use email to automatically
send a series of emails that will help you sift
through and segment your list by drawing out
more and more information from your contacts.

15. Finally, Use Lead Scoring and Follow Up!
The criteria you use to determine what qualities a lead
needs to make them an ideal buyer is specific to your
business. These criteria can be determined by tracking
the actions and behaviors of your current customers on
your site.
If all your customers clicked on links in your emails or
downloaded a specific piece of advanced content, those
actions should probably play a big role in your lead
qualification.

16. Lead What?!
Lead scoring (a function of HubSpot) allows you to assign
a number of points to any given action by a contact.
For example:
• Contact downloads another ebook: +10 points
• Contact “company name” equals blank: -50 points
• Contact opens 3 emails in 2 months: +5 points
And so on until they reach a threshold that makes them a
good prospect. Now reach out to them personally.

17. Look What You’ve Built!
The steps we outlined:
• Generating traffic
• Generating leads
• Nurturing leads
• Scoring leads
all combine to form a cost-effective alternative to
traditional, interruptive marketing. As you continue to
tweak and improve these processes, you and your team
will get more efficient at carrying them out, and your
marketing operation will perform like a well-oiled lead
generating machine.

18. What You’ll Need to Implement Inbound
1 Website
Developer
1 Graphic
Designer
1
Experienced
Marketer
1 Writer
For business owners, hiring an inbound marketing company
means getting a team of inbound marketing experts for about
the cost of one employee. Your team of experts will tap into its
reserve of specialized skills in order to tailor a marketing strategy
for you. Above all else, that inbound marketing team will focus
on results.
Or, Outsource it.

19. Getting Back to the Point: Saving on
Marketing
Reducing your marketing costs isn’t about slashing
costs in areas that are essential to business
development.
Reducing marketing costs is about streamlining
the efficiency of your marketing so it becomes a
complement to sales. Marketing and sales should
act like two components in a business development
machine.