So, you’ve bought into the fact that Inbound Marketing can help your business increase lead conversions by driving prospects through the sales funnel (ToFU, MoFU, BoFU), yet your new inbound strategy isn’t producing the desired results.
Inbound Marketing can be a lot to take on if you’re unprepared, but by avoiding these following mistakes, you’ll be that much closer to winning over your audience, and converting your leads from start to close.
Mistake One: Focusing On Quick Results
This mistake is an easy one for new inbounders to make. They see all of these strategies, best practices, and how they’ll help your business succeed; they want to dive in now. But, that’s not the point of Inbound Marketing. The ideas is to have all of your processes sync together to form one continuous loop—a loop that attracts, converts, closes and delights all of prospects in an automated process.
But you need steadiness and consistency in your channels, as every piece to the strategy works towards the common goal of lead generation. It’s like building one of those long, 500-piece jigsaw puzzles. You can’t rush it, and you can’t fake your way through it to produce overnight results. Be aware of the time it takes to build out your audience and brand, because there are no shortcuts, and when it comes to bringing in quality leads, I’m not sure you’d want to try. After all, you’re in this for the long haul, right?
Mistake Two: Everything’s Inconsistent
There’s nothing worse than an inbound marketing strategy with multiple personality disorder. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t be flexible in what you’re providing to your audience, as the ability to act and adjust on the fly is one of Inbound Marketing’s major benefits. Your job is to hammer down on the who, what, when, and how before you can even begin to establish your game plan. Without these ideologies fully cemented in your strategy, you’re likely to succumb to inconsistent content in both form and focus.
Posting consistent content isn’t without work—it means establish a schedule that you stick to, a tone that carries the brand, and the kind of materials you’re willing to share—all of it. You can’t flip-flop what you meant here or said there, because confusing your audience is the last thing you’d ever want. They need to have a solid feel for who you are and what you’re about just from reading your published content. And if they can’t, again, you’ll need to figure out where the drop off is and how to fix it for your future customers.
Mistake 3: Failing To Measure and Adjust
One of the major benefits that stems from inbound marketing is the plethora of information and analytics available for each campaign, even zooming in as far as singular results per each post! All of this information is here for a reason—it’s the crux of inbound marketing, and its there to help make your campaigns that much more successful.
When you can track the stats to each individual aspect of your marketing campaign, you can better understand where you’re succeeding, and which areas need a little help or should be dropped completely. Failing to do this happens more than you’d think. All of this is building towards a better future for your business and it needs to be done the right way, and that means establishing a flow of constant checks and balances. To not check your results is like actively watching your opportunity costs fade into the distance.
Mistake Four: Hang It Out To Dry
Another all-too-common mistake is posting content without actively engaging with your audience and their responses. Inbound is built on communication and flow, so it’s no surprise that communication is a vital cog to the inbound machine. All of this is working towards a better, trusted business brand but before you get there, you need to be better and trusted. Engaging with your audience is a great way of achieving this.
Visitors should be able to comment on your blog articles, social posts, and wherever else they feel they should be heard. You’re not there to censor them—why would they trust a brand that censors their comments, good or bad? You should be a guiding voice for them, and that means responding to their questions, comments, and concerns. They’ll be more than likely to respond back, and it shows others who happen upon the post that you care. On the opposite end, if you’re not responding to your audience, why would they bother to connect, comment, or engage with you at all?
Mistake Five: Where’s the CTA?
This is a big one. You’ve worked so hard through all of the inbound steps to grow a healthy following on your website. But, now that they’re here, what are you offering them to engage further with your brand? How are they converting to customers? You need CTAs to accomplish all of this! You need to give your audience a way to engage further with your brand.
It sounds like common sense, but not enough websites are doing this. Yeah, you got a visitor there, but what reason do they have to further their relationship with your brand? CTAs are your way of continuing the relationship, often utilized in a workflow that automatically guides them down the funnel. Think of it like this: if you aren’t giving them a reason to keep coming back, would they? Would you? Of course not. So capture their attention, and interest with a well-positioned CTA, and you may just convert a new lead to your newest customer.
In the End...
Mistakes happen. The beautiful thing is, with inbound marketing, they don’t have to haunt you forever. Mistakes are part of the plan, and as long as you fix the problems, your company’s better for experiencing them, and learn why they shouldn’t continue making those mistakes in the future.
