How much does an Inbound Marketing Strategy cost at ESM Inbound?

Inbound marketing is a venture that works much in the same way as your office space, employees or software. It's an investment in your company's future growth. 

Adopting inbound marketing at your company comes with a price tag. However, like any smart investment, a good strategy ends up paying for itself, and helps you gain a competitive advantage over other companies who are entirely dependent on outbound approaches.

That said, any businesses are steadily increasing their inbound marketing. HubSpot reports that over 70% of marketers are actively investing in inbound marketing. Of those, more than 60% say that inbound marketing is their most effective strategy and is extremely important for their business. 

At ESM Inbound, our mission is 'Everybody Smile More', that extends to our clients as much as our own team. Therefore, we offer our inbound marketing strategy services at prices that reflect the value your business will see from that investment. Keeping you smiling more as you reap the benefits of using a robust strategy is at the heart of our pricing structure.

We follow these three principles when pricing our services:

• Transparency: There are no hidden costs of production: your initial strategy will be priced in such a way that you can take that as it is, or get ESM Inbound to build the whole kit and caboodle for you!
• Predictability: You can predict what you need to pay through our No-Risk Retainer model: if you're likely to need ongoing strategy and inbound marketing support from ESM Inbound, you can pay a fixed price each month.
• Fairness: Every price model is customised to suit the size and type of business - we also let you change or end any retainers you have with us at any time so you aren't trapped paying for a service you no longer need. No need for 30 days notice, treat your No-Risk Retainer the same way you would your Netflix subscription.

How much does it cost to work with ESM Inbound?

The best answer to this question is: it depends on your budget and what your goals are... but that's a bit of a cop-out answer, and many consultancies shy away from talking about money - we don't want to be one of them. 

After exploring your goals and previous successes and failures - through a diagnostic engagement, SEO audit, or other fact-finding ground work - we will look at a long-, mid- and short-term strategy. Our objective is to leave you with a plan for where your business can go in the future, but also the things you can change right now to start seeing results.

Due to the complexities that often exist when offering an inbound marketing strategy, ESM Inbound has found a way to make pricing more efficient and standardised for our clients. We start with a low-payment, value-add exploratory project - typically costing between £2,000 and £9,000. This enables you to find the benchmark by which future inbound marketing efforts will be measured, and to identify quick wins to kick-start your strategy.

If you choose to proceed with an in-depth strategy development project, you can find our pricing tiers here.

What is a No-Risk Retainer?

We provide a No-Risk Retainer model to businesses who choose to work with ESM Inbound long-term - in fact, most of the inbound marketing clients we work with use this model as it proves better value over time (and thankfully, our customers enjoy working with us longer-term than one-off projects!)

The No-Risk Retainer model has many benefits, including:

• It's more flexible, allowing you to change the services that can be included each month.
• It's just as it sounds, meaning that the retainer contract between us poses no risk to your business - you can choose to stop working with ESM Inbound at any time.
• You get to work on long-term projects, tapping into ESM Inbound's complete suite of expertise, instead of just benefitting from one department. 
• You can work to a budget that works for you and know exactly how your hours will be spent with us each month (whilst soaking up the expert training we offer through our regular consultation work with you).

With 'Joy' being one of our core values, we work hard to ensure that fairness is built into our pricing structure.

The process of cancelling a No-Risk Retainer with ESM Inbound is effortless. You don't have to fill in paperwork or wait for an extended period. You email your account manager, and the process starts immediately to end the contract.

Inbound marketing strategy with ESM Inbound

Typically, our No-Risk Retainer contracts range between 40-90 hours of work each month, and between £4,400 to £9,000 per month.

The contract includes:

• A dedicated account manager for email and video call support
• Priority placement in our work queue
• Weekly oversight of your account by our Senior Leadership team.

Successful inbound marketing encompasses various foundational and ongoing elements to get the most out of your investment. The pricing model in our contract includes all the fundamentals that will ensure the strategy works as needed. So, at the start of your retainer, we will likely focus on:

• Carrying out keyword research
• developing your buyer personas
• Conducting content gap analysis
• Running competitor research
• Documenting your strategy.
  
  

Before we start developing solutions, we need to be sure of the position of your business in the market. It's also essential to learn how your prospects behave and the kinds of content they will respond to.

The minimum time we recommend spending on strategy with our model is three months but you are not tied into this with a No-Risk Retainer. Marketing results can't be rushed, and you need to plan effectively, launch your campaign, then optimise your inbound marketing initiatives as you go, reporting as more and more data comes in, and making informed decisions accordingly.

Your first inbound marketing campaign

Once the strategy has been created, you may choose to move on to your first inbound marketing campaign with ESM Inbound. We will focus around one of the cluster topics that has been highlighted as an opportunity during the strategy portion of our work. We generally offer:

• Four blog posts: Blog posts help to attract new and existing customers/clients. They help provide relevant information on your website to capture visitors' attention by giving them answers to their questions.
• One pillar page: 3,000+ word pillar pages help cover one of the topics you want to rank for in great detail as a one-stop shop for your prospect to find out everything they need in one place.
• CTAs: It's best to compel your prospects to take the desired actions with a powerful CTA to encourage conversion.
• Landing page: Those CTAs need to go somewhere so we link each one to an appropriate landing page where the visitor will convert into a lead, ensuring your visitors are one step closer to becoming your next customers.
• Thank you page: To give your prospects the best possible experience, we use thank you pages once they've converted.
• Follow-up email(s): We create a series of follow-up emails to nurture leads, personalising them to ensure it's your brand who is front of mind once they're ready to make a purchase.
• Lead generation workflows: We use HubSpot to ensure leads are nurtured with relevant content at appropriate intervals, creating robust pathways for them to follow through your marketing funnel until they're ready to be contacted by your sales team.

We also offer additional content deliverables, depending on your needs and the success of your initial marketing strategy. Some of these assets include:

• Search ads
• Display ads
• Paid social campaigns
• Organic social posts.

Are you interested in starting your inbound marketing strategy with ESM Inbound? Get in touch and talk to an inbound marketing specialist today.