With the rise in inbound marketing for small to large businesses, there are bound to be several common mistakes that arise as well. Inbound marketing is difficult to get started due to the amount of effort that goes into the process and because of this, many mistakes can be made. We want to make sure you don’t fall into a pit of inbound marketing mistakes so here are some examples to look out for!
1. Starting without a “sound marketing strategy” will not deliver results. Your client depends on you to help them by providing a plan for them so that they know what’s to come. A strategy allows you to organize your marketing tactics to help your business get found, find customers and convert them into leads. From there, you extend that strategy to help plan how to get the results your leads are looking for.
2. Thinking that an inbound marketing program like HubSpot does it all is not the way to go about this method. Yes, these programs help greatly but it is you yourself and your employees that need to actually put the effort in to place data and continually work on this. HubSpot is great to keep all of your data in check but you yourself need to create compelling content for your viewers. You need to find different ways to attract readers whether its through text, images, videos, ebooks, white papers, etc. Think out of the box for things that others don’t have information about so that people can only go to you for what they need.
3. Not paying attention to the statistics can result in you wasting your time on certain aspects of your marketing strategy that don’t drive much of a response rate. Inbound marketing is a science as well as a creative business tactic. You need to measure traffic rates, conversion rates, leads and sales. This gives your clients a benchmark before you even start marketing for them, giving them an idea of how successful you are. By doing so, your credibility goes up greatly and you will be seen in a better light by prospective customers.
4. Using your inbound marketing skills without integrating your outbound marketing skills is a waste of opportunities. Inbound marketing may be the new successful tactic, but outbound marketing is still going on to this day. Why? Because it’s effective as well. You can’t just throw away something good because you found something better. You need to try to integrate them together to get the BEST tactic you can. Through outbound marketing you are reaching out to your customer, which is necessary. If you use both inbound and outbound marketing, you will reach out to potential leads and they will reach out to you as well. By having a two-way system, the chances of conversion are doubled. That means twice as many opportunities and you don’t want to just waste that.
5. Sticking to inbound marketing as is is trapping yourself. Effort is needed for every marketing strategy and inbound marketing is changing everyday. You need to adapt to the new social media outlets, features and policies all over the web. Everything is becoming more complex and needs more analysis and detail. If you don’t keep up with the changes, then you are missing out on many opportunities. You need to stay up to date and adapt to what’s going on around you because if you’re not doing so, other businesses are and they will surpass you. Inbound marketing is a non-stop cycle of effort but if you don’t do the work, you won’t get the results.