When used well, inbound marketing is a strategy that can deliver outstanding results—especially for those companies that have the wisdom and the patience to watch it mature and blossom. However, there are a number of pitfalls that can leave you spinning your wheels and not taking full advantage of all that content marketing has to offer. Understanding what these pitfalls are and how to avoid them is critically important.
Keeping Your Inbound Marketing on the Fast Track
If you are just getting started with content marketing, or have a program in place but aren’t seeing the results you’d hoped for, here are some issues that you want to lookout for and quickly resolve.
- You aren’t offering content across the full spectrum of the buyer’s journey
Laura is visiting your website for the first time and is just beginning her research on your products or services. Mike has been to your site multiple times and is almost ready to make a purchase—he just needs one more nudge. Of course, you want both Laura and Mike to become customers. But what Laura needs to move her further along in her buyer’s journey and what Mike needs to complete his are very different pieces of content. If you’re not providing both of them what they’re looking for, you may lose one or the other (or heaven forbid, both!). Be sure that you are producing content that is helpful for people at every stage of the journey. - You don’t have the right lead generation tools at your disposal
While your gut feel and marketing instincts are something to be proud of, they probably aren’t enough to keep you ahead of your competition when it comes to attracting, engaging, and closing prospects. Marketing today is very data-driven and if you don’t have a good grasp of the data, you will inevitably fall behind. As a HubSpot Partner, we’re big believers in the HubSpot suite of marketing automation and analytics tools. With them, you can track every aspect of every marketing campaign and have an almost prophetic understanding of how to appeal to every prospect in your CRM system. - You aren’t focusing enough time and effort on your best web pages
Not wanting to neglect any of the pages on your website, you’re giving them all roughly equal time when it comes to refining their information, updating their visuals, etc. But the truth is, your stats show that some of your web pages get far more traffic and lead to far more conversions than others. Consequently, you should be spending far more time and effort fine-tuning and optimizing them. Certainly, you shouldn’t completely ignore the other pages, but they should be appropriately prioritized. - You haven’t optimized your Contact forms
It’s somewhat ironic that for all the effort you put into the other pages on your website, what’s on your Contact form (or isn’t on your Contact form) can make all the difference between whether a prospect converts or abandons. If you’re only going to do extensive testing and optimization on one page of your website (and that would be foolish, but just for argument’s sake… ), it should be your Contact form. - You aren’t using social media strategically
Marketers sometimes dismiss social media as only being helpful for “top of funnel” activities, if at all. The truth is, social media can be much more effective than that. If you are analyzing your posts, you’ll see that some generate more interest than others or more interest from prospects at different points in the buyer’s journey. (And if you’re not analyzing your posts, why not?) Take what you learn from that analysis and use it to your advantage. Your social media strategy can and should move past a simple “fire and forget” mentality.
Your Trusted Guide Through the Inbound Marketing Jungle
As a firm that’s been around for more than two decades, we know where all the potential pitfalls lay that are waiting to suck you in, and we can guide you skillfully around them. We do that for clients around the U.S. every day. We’d love to help guide you down the inbound marketing strategy path.
