A long time ago, when we were onboarding our first customers at HubSpot, someone asked one of our consultants to visit their company, talk with their executives and come up with an internet marketing strategy for them. His response was, "No. Here's the damn [inbound marketing] process. Just follow it." While his response probably could have been slightly softened, it is true.

Joel Gerdis at the Content Squad describes the 'value of an internet marketing process' in a bit more detail.

Let's take the mystery out of SEO and inbound marketing. When you work a real strategy and comprehensive plan you have set goals, expectations, and benchmarks you want to achieve. This is where it gets exciting for businesses when you tell them, "here is the process and here is what you should expect in two months." When two months have passed and the goals are nearly achieved, are reached, or are exceeded, clients' eyes get a little bigger and trust is developing. Every month you are getting valuable analytics that verify you are on the right track and the process is refined to improve the results. Where is the end of the refinement? There is no end to the refinement. You continually analyze the data, your effort, and make subtle changes that can have significant results for the program.

When a client works with an agency with defined processes and those processes help the client achieve their sales and marketing goals, things go swimmingly. The Content Squad knows because they achieve it with their clients, by following the right processes.

Today, more than 350 business owners and marketers attended the first session of a two day workshop to help them set business, sales and marketing goals. Tomorrow's session will teach them how another business used the 'inbound marketing process' to exceed their goals handsomely. If you haven't written your goals, created a plan to get there and adopted the processes to implement the plan, you're a step behind the rest. You should tune in and learn the process.