A large percentage of our clients come to us with a track record of inbound marketing attempts. Most of them have had less than stellar results. It’s easy to figure out why too. After peering into some analytics and asking a few questions the reasons are obvious. Below is a list of seven of the most common reasons for having lack-luster inbound marketing results.
- Publishing blog posts inconsistently – This is perhaps the most common problem we see. Any momentum a blog has will be killed if it goes on a four week publishing hiatus. At minimum a blog should have three new posts per week with the ideal number being 21.
- Few to no moral bribes – Many companies believe that their contact us form and/or their newsletter subscribe form will provide them with leads. It may, but compared to the leads that can be garnered through the use of CTA’s connected to landing pages with downloads and other forms of advanced content the leads will be small in number.
- Stale advanced content – It’s not uncommon to see the same one or two white papers for the life of a website. If the goal is to capture leads, than having fresh advanced content every month will not only help increase lead capture, but it will establish lead nurturing over time.
- Not using social media as a content distribution channel – Organizations that push their blog/advanced content onto Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn will not only garner more website traffic and leads, but their content will spark new engagement, relationships and brand advocates while assisting the campaign's SEO efforts.
- Not solving problems – People only go to the internet for two reasons: to solve problems and/or to be entertained. If content on a website is not solving people’s problems then the website will fail at capturing leads. Throwing up some PDF brochures and hiding them behind a form does not help people solve their problems. It may, however, help solve a competitor’s problem of needing intelligence.
- No lead nurturing – After someone downloads a piece of advanced content from a website following up with that person via an email drip is a proven way to qualify and nurture that person into an actionable lead. By not doing so a potential business opportunity could be lost.
- Spending too much time on SEO – Search engine optimization is great to have in an inbound marketing campaign, but spending the majority of the campaign’s time trying to build backlinks, dissecting competitor’s websites and analyzing keywords can be a detriment to an inbound marketing campaign. Publishing fresh content on a regular basis using keyword phrases that describe what a business does will provide much more SEO value than if 90 percent of the campaign is spent on SEO.
Above represents merely seven common reasons inbound marketing campaigns fail. There are many more potential reasons, but these are the big ones we see. For more help with inbound marketing download our free Inbound Marketing Blueprint.
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