A zillion dollars! Just kidding. 
As you can imagine, it's not possible for me to tell you exactly how much it will cost you to do inbound marketing. There are too many variables involved, such as:
- Your available internal resources
- Experience level of the people you hire
- How advanced you are with your current marketing strategy
- Your goals and objectives
But, I'm going to see if I can give you some general idea about what to expect.
Blog Articles
On the cheap side, I've seen prices range from $80 for 4 blog posts to $250 for 4 blog posts. The problem I've seen with the low-end blog prices is that they don't necessarily follow blog best practices - meaning keywords, article length, graphical appeal, compelling titles, and strategy for engaging prospects. So, I'm not sure how much articles like that will actually help you.
For a blog program that includes the whole kit and caboodle - including everything mentioned above plus managing the entire posting process, article promotion, and ongoing strategy and analytics, you might pay $1500+ for 4 articles.
Website Design
You get what you pay for. Really bad might be $1500 - $2000, and totally awesome might be $20,000 or more. There is so much to think about when investing in a website. You should invest as much into it as you would a physical store, comparatively speaking. Your site is your virtual storefront where most people will get their first impression of you. If it's ramshackle, they'll turn away in jiffy, never to be seen again.
Design is only one small part of it too. The strategy is just as important, if not more so. The whole goal is to use your website to get more business, so you need a plan in place to make that happen. The strategy and design go together.
So now you're talking 2 things: design AND strategy. I think most small businesses could get something decent for between $15,000 - $35,000. Anything less than $5000, and you're bordering on really bad, waste of money. Between $5,000 - $10,000 the design might look OK, but you're probably lacking in the strategy and marketing functionality.
Premium Content Creation
There are infinite types of content - videos, ebooks, infographics, case studies, etc. Each piece of content is unique and will need to be priced out individually. However, I know you want to know how much this stuff costs, so I'm going to give you some generalities about what to expect.
Something like a professionally developed ebook, case study, or video could cost anywhere between $2500 - $5000+. That could include the writing, layout, and graphics (or it might not!).
It's important to remember that for these content offers, it's not just about the content itself. You need to have a marketing campaign in place to promote it, which should include things like landing pages, social media promotion, and email marketing. Best practices say you should spend the same amount of time promoting your campaign as it took to create it, which when translated to dollars, about doubles the cost. If you spend $5K to create premium content, you spend $5K to promote it.
It sounds like a lot, I know. But - the cool thing about this kind of content is that it can continue to generate leads for a long, long time, so it's a good investment - especially if it's well done. Poorly done (cheaply done) content won't get you the same results. You need to take that into consideration when you are thinking about the ROI.
Just ask yourself: How many leads / customers do I need to get from this investment to make me happy, and is that realistic?
Social Media
To hire someone (clarification: someone that knows what they are doing!) to write your social posts, schedule, monitor, and respond your behalf, it will probably cost between $1000 - $2500 per month. If you want someone to help you set up and develop your profiles and implement special social media campaigns, that will be an additional cost.
Email Marketing
Ahhhh.... good 'ole email marketing - my favorite. This falls closely in line with the blog writing. But with email marketing, you have the whole list management piece to add into it. You need to manage your database to keep it clean with valid emails, and continuously add or delete contacts based on what's going on with your marketing campaigns. $1500 for 4 or 5 emails a month would be a reasonable estimate on how much you would spend.
Conclusion
There's more I could talk about, but you're getting the idea.
If you're a small business and this seems WAY out of reach for you, don't despair. There are ways you can start dipping your toe in the water at a price you can afford. If you're not sure how much you should invest in marketing, read How Much Should You Spend on Marketing?
If you are a super small business and have hardly any money available for marketing, you'll probably have to get on the do-it-yourself model until you get big enough to bring on some help. But if you do that, make sure you do some research first on how to do it right so you don't waste your valuable time! HubSpot has tons of free resources to help you become good at inbound marketing so you can grow.
To find out more about what inbound marketing will cost YOU, let's talk.
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