The concept of inbound marketing, or getting attention organically without interrupting someone’s path, is gradually being embraced by digital marketers across all industry verticals as content, SEO and social media inevitably converge to drive website organic traffic. Equally subject to these forces, higher ed marketers are learning about and beginning to apply this new strategy to college and university student recruitment by adapting their thinking, marketing planning and execution to reflect this new world order.
Inbound marketing requires a more integrated approach to marketing planning and implementation. To help higher ed marketers adapt to and achieve this integration, we have created the HEM Inbound Marketing Calculator. This calculator provides a tool that facilitates planning and budgeting across SEO, social media and content marketing to encourage a more holistic, and hopefully more successful, approach to inbound marketing.
Here is what the calculator looks like:
The calculator provides two approaches on how to set up your budgeting for inbound, including 1) a one-time project-based approach and 2) a monthly-based approach intended for longer term budgeting. Once you have selected one of these approaches, you simply pick the marketing activities that you want to include in your budget and the calculator helps you build your plan. The calculator makes a number of baseline assumptions around the costs of activities and the amount of time needed to complete them based on our experience providing these services. The number of hours/month required to complete different activities defaults to our estimate but it can be revised by the user.
The calculator organizes budgeting into four main areas of inbound marketing activity, including:
- Content Strategy
- Content Development
- Website SEO
- Social Media Strategy and Development
It organizes your costs for each of these areas according to one-time costs, recurring monthly costs and total costs of the complete “project”. The calculator also provides you with a convenient option to print your budget scenarios with a click of the “Print This Budget” button.
We hope you will find this calculator helpful to get your marketing thinking, planning and budgets organized around the concept of inbound marketing. We would like you to view this V1 release of the calculator as our Beta. We believe it is pretty solid but it is hard to get things perfect right out of the gate, so please let us know if you find any bugs or have any suggestions on how we can improve it. We look forward to your feedback on the calculator and to improving on it, with future updates.
