How Long Does Inbound Marketing Take to Get Results?

Before you even begin implementing inbound marketing, you most likely have questions about your return on investment and when you can actually begin to see results.

Unlike placing an ad in a newspaper or advertising through billboards; where you're pushing your products and services on customers. You will be utilizing inbound marketing tactics that earn the trust and interest of prospects.

Unfortunately, you won't be able to earn the trust and interest of your prospects overnight it takes time.

One of the most important questions you might have is, how long does inbound marketing take to get results?

3 Ways to See Results with Inbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing is a permission based methodology that focuses on driving relevant traffic to your website, converting that traffic to leads, and finally, turning those leads into sales. Even though inbound marketing takes time, it is the best and most effective method for proving your expertise, improving your brand visibility, engaging with your target audience, and driving leads and customers.

A Long Term Strategy

How long does inbound marketing take to get results?

Brace yourself; most inbound marketing campaigns take 6-9 months to start seeing a return on marketing investment. However, it is also extremely important to acknowledge that not every company is going to see results within that time frame. There will be some companies that see results before or after those 6-9 months.

After the initial setup of your inbound marketing campaign, it is important to develop a long-term marketing strategy. The main objective of inbound marketing is being able to provide your prospects with highly relevant and educational content. Without any content, you won't see any results generated through that blog platform you've set up.

Develop a long-term strategy that includes:

• Blog calendar

• Set up social media profiles on the social media platforms where your prospects hang out

• Relevant offers that will attract prospects at every stage of the sales process

• Long-tail keywords

• Developing and nailing your value proposition, this will be the foundation of all of your marketing efforts and content

Need to Build Relationships with Prospects

A great way to for you get your name out there is to build relationships with your prospects, the people that are going to be reading your blog, following you on social media and connecting with you.

You want to develop relationships to help expand the reach of your company through building fans and followers. This will make your inbound marketing program highly scalable and repeatable. The cost of posting your blog to 100 people is going to be the same when you're posting it to 1,000 people. When people subscribe to your blog, they will automatically receive your post in their inbox. Through those relationships you've built and the remarkable content your developing, your reach will expand even more. Remember to keep in mind that you want to develop content your readers will want to share with their network.

Ways to build relationships:

• Share other peoples content

• Ask questions on social media

• Be original

• Understand who your audience is

• Develop the right content

The More You do, the Better the Results

The biggest factor in contributing to how fast or slow you see results is how much content you create on a regular basis. So if you want to generate results you need to develop remarkable content regularly. If you create 4 blog articles and one piece of premium content per month, your results are going to be slower than if you create 30 blog articles and 10 pieces of premium content per month.

Don't forget that you cannot measure the success of inbound marketing, if you haven't set a series of benchmarks. Establishing clear goals, that are both long and short term. This will be essential to help you identify your key performance metrics, you should regularly track and analysis to improve your campaign.

You should also consider implementing some of the following inbound marketing tactics:

• Video marketing

• Guest blogging

• Landing page creation

• On-page SEO

• Social media engagement

• Call to actions

If you only want to blog, it is important to note that it is going to take twice as long if not more to see any results from your inbound marketing campaign. It is important to maintain perspective when developing and planning your inbound marketing campaign. To develop a great campaign that will generate quality leads and traffic to your site, refer to your campaign as "Rome" and the old idiom Rome wasn't built in a day. With the right amount of timing, patience and hard work you will begin to see results, whether its 2 months from now or  nine. It all depends on how much work you put into it.