The 11 Personas of Inbound Marketing Deniers
Over the years Kuno has seen a plethora of objections, reasons why not and push back from people who generally don’t believe in the principals of inbound marketing. Many of these folks have unrealistic expectations and want cheap gimmicky tricks to rank them well in the search engines, produce leads and accelerate their brand. After some thought, it’s clear that most of them fall in one of the 11 personas below.
- The Lazy Dude/Dudette: You want me to write a blog article three or more times per week or pay someone to? My competitors don’t do that. They pay people in India to build backlinks and they’re all on the first page of Google.
- The Scientist: Now that you’ve made a site map I need you to come up with 20 keyword phrases for each page and 20 variations of each of those. When you’re done with that I need a keyword content placement formula for every page. We should rank number one for them all in a few days.
- The Traveler: We have locations in every major city across the country. Our website should be number one for all of the geo-local searches.
- The Set It & Forget It: Calls to action? Downloadable material? I just want them to set an appointment. That’s the only CTA we need. Besides, I have a contact us page and a newsletter signup.
- The Anti-socialite: My customers aren’t on social media. That’s a waste of time and it’s nothing but kids and stalkers.
- The Desk Topper: A mobile website? Most of my customers still have flip phones. Besides, nobody searches for what I do on a phone.
- The Computer Expert: I’m not paying for a CMS. Why should I when I’ve been building computers since the 80’s and coding websites with FrontPage since 1997.
- The Host/Hostess: We have our own servers here and we’d never pay for hosting. That’s stupid. Besides, I know it’s safe on our servers.
- The He/She Hate Me: We must track the exact ROI for everything or we’re not going to do it. Scratch blogging, mobile and social media. By the way, do you have the proofs done on that billboard design yet?
- The Email Loather: It is not polite to send out an email blast more than once per quarter. If we do we’ll make our subscribers angry and hurt our brand.
- The Code Monkey: [carrying tens of thousands of pieces of paper] I’ve printed off the website code for all of my competitors. Everything you need to outrank them is in here. We’ll meet again in a month to look at the progress.
Inbound marketing is hard work and no gimmick or secret formula will change that. It’s also constantly changing so what these people thought worked probably doesn’t anymore. Even though there are only 11 personas above, you’re encouraged to add to the list below. There are probably some doozies we’ve left out. For help getting your inbound marketing off the ground download the Inbound Marketing Blue Print and subscribe to our blog.
Image: Elitist Czar
Inbound Marketing is the New SEO – Facts, Figures & Data
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