5 Questions With... Matt Mills, WTOP

Learning from your peers is one of the best ways to see if you should get started with inbound marketing, or whether you're on the right path in your inbound marketing adventure.

That's why we started the "5 Questions With..." series. On today's episode, we asked Matt Mills, Director of Sales at WTOP, for his unique perspective on getting started from scratch.

1. You started an inbound marketing program a year ago. What problem or challenge did you have that implementing an inbound solution will be the best solution for?

It wasn’t so much a problem as a constant need to find new business. Traditional methods are to cold call, but if we could have clients that asked for our help in solving their marketing problems we would rather approach them that way.

2. How are you measuring your ROI with inbound marketing?

In many ways:

• Client interaction (our sellers are using it to provide credibility and to answer marketing questions)
• Social outreach with existing clients
• Thought leadership
• Learning about inbound marketing and blogging (since our clients are doing this more and more), and
• Ultimately, sales made from inbound leads

3. What was your content strategy before inbound marketing?

It was loose since there was so much content (our blog is a general marketing blog). We wanted to write stories that our target audience would be interested in. Which we defined by creating an ideal customer profile of who that was.

4. What would you recommend to companies that haven’t started using inbound marketing and online lead generation? What’s a good way for companies to get started?

Many companies can start blogging through their current website as part of an SEO play. In fact, this is very common. If the blog is showing value, then that would provide motivation to expanding it to capture leads directly from it.

5. What's the most challenging part of inbound marketing?

Content generation, time to run the program and lead follow up. Lead nurturing just takes time. But getting them from being nurtured to closing isn’t always easy.  It of course depends on what you are selling.