Subscribe by Email

Your email:

Brand & Capture

Current Articles | RSS Feed RSS Feed

What to Do When Your Inbound Marketing Results Take a Dive

 

Welcome back from your nice, long, relaxing holiday. Your website and inbound marketing results took a break too. Traffic's way down and leads are flatlining. Why? Well, it's partly because other people were toasting with eggnog or tanning in Florida. But let's face it, most of the blame can be placed squarely on us, the inbound marketers.

Don't despair. There is plenty of hope in this new year. Here's a recipe for climbing back up to greatness and exceeding last year's results.inbound marketing results sometimes decline

  • Content - Let's get back into the habit of blogging every day, if possible. But this year, let's put a new spin on it. Let's include more impromptu videos, more fun, more education and a fresh attitude on our stuff.
  • Social Media - Oh yeah, it's been a while since we Tweeted and Facebooked about anything other than a quick update on life. Let's resolve to really use these tools for business this year. Learn how from the social media influencers you follow and get after it. This is really the key to success in inbound marketing.
  • Lead Conversion - Wow, we really hit the skids in December, and it's hurting us in January. Let's figure out what we can offer (for free) and get it out there on landing pages right now. Let's combine that with daily content and social engagement to ramp up the interest level and capture some leads. Let's follow up with lead nurturing and make sure we don't let the big ones get away.
  • Measurement - Let's look at last year's results first. What worked and what didn't? Let's focus on topics that resonate with our likely customers. Let's fine tune our strategy and avoid mistakes. Let's figure out what we do best and do that more often.

What about this year's holidays? Why not create a new inbound marketing strategy that will embrace them rather than fall off the charts? Maybe if we stop thinking about this as work and start having fun instead...

That's my 2 cents. Anybody else care to weigh in?


Comments

John, 
 
Excellent points! Taking all of what you mention in your post and organizing the tasks into a comprehensive marketing calendar will help, IMO. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, but I find that having something in black and white that I can review daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly keeps me on task.  
 
Thanks for the post--a great reminder to refocus! 
 
Mark
Posted @ Tuesday, January 12, 2010 12:04 PM by Mark Smallwood
Great post - thanks - especially liked your Social Media Marketing (SMM) comment. I think many of us are in precisely the same position - results not great for the past month or so. 
One thing we have found works well for our own efforts and is always well received by our clients, is to calculate the Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI or plain ROI), for everything we do. And then, using the cold facts, do more of what works and less of what doesn't. A great way to improve moving forward. Great, you may be saying, but just how does one calculate ROMI for everything? We got asked that question so many times, we wrote 3 posts to cover our various answers. For those wanting to know, here are the links: 
1) How to calculate the ROMI of your website as a whole: http://bit.ly/6bFSvs 
2) A list of the 10 best free ROI calculators on the web: http://bit.ly/7fwBkF 
3) How to build your own ROI calculator (perhaps for your social media campaign): http://bit.ly/6IGZQh 
Posted @ Tuesday, January 12, 2010 12:47 PM by Eric Goldman
Mark,  
I agree. Keep it simple, but keep it coming. I like the calendar idea. Especially if you're working on multiple client accounts, it's easy to forget.  
 
Eric,  
You're right about the ROI. If people are paying you to get results, better shown them results! Thanks for sharing your excellent posts.
Posted @ Tuesday, January 12, 2010 12:55 PM by John McTigue
John, Thanks for great reminder. just wrote an posted article on Li groups "Create your Book's Platform Before you Write it." Same idea.  
 
 
 
Preplanning and planning both help keep us on track of what's not working and what is. Each year I review it all. This year, doing fewer tweets that through hootsuite, go directly to my FB Fan pages an my LI profile page. Amazing how the interactions vev up the results. Being active is a good thing in these, but watch your time.  
 
 
 
I still love article marketing for the long haul--wrote 3 books on it -- with all the rule changes in it from last 2 years.  
 
 
 
Also installing a wordpress for traffic--it's another experiment to stimulate my business audience who want to manifest their book dream. 
 
 
 
We also use Google analytics each month and retool what needs it. And, always updating and optimizing site--doing it all. 
 
Now, what else will the net tickle me into doing? 
 
 
 
I think I'll take a walk now! 
 
Posted @ Tuesday, January 12, 2010 12:56 PM by Judy cullins
Judy, 
Thanks. I'm a big fan of LI too and use it all the time for both learning and engagement. I recommend HubSpot for putting all the pieces together. It's the only platform I know of that combines blogging, SEO, social media monitoring, lead conversion, and analytics. A little pricey, but well worth it. One converted lead pays for it, and you should get that from being able to spend more time on great content and less on organizing.
Posted @ Tuesday, January 12, 2010 1:05 PM by John McTigue
I have literally just emailed off my blog report for 2009 to my boss so this post is spot on timing wise for me - thanks!  
 
deBugged was started in March last year and its very interesting to see which posts engendered further deeper visits into the site and which had very high visitor volume but very short visit times.  
 
I think a balance between the two is my aim for this year - so I am doing exactly what you said under your measurment point. 
Posted @ Thursday, January 14, 2010 3:48 AM by Danusia
Danusia, 
That's a great point about balancing between popular and deeper posts. I find the same pull between opinion pieces (less popular) and helpful posts (more popular). Common sense would tell you to just do the helpful posts, but you have to be real too, and the opinion pieces definitely let your audience know more about you. Of course, some people may just unsubscribe when they read your opinion, but that's the beauty of social media - it's democratic and people vote by turning you on or off.
Posted @ Thursday, January 14, 2010 9:33 AM by John McTigue
Comments have been closed for this article.