If a blog is published online and nobody finds it, does it make a sound? That’s a silly rip-off of a classic unanswerable question, but it brings up an issue worth considering: if you write great content for your inbound marketing strategy, how useful is it if nobody reads it?

There are many reasons inbound marketing has become one of the most effective and popular marketing strategies in the business world. For starters, it’s extremely cost effective – relying completely on the internet for marketing eliminates those expensive direct mail and traditional marketing fees. It’s also eminently adaptable; since everything lives online, you can change your website, messaging, content or email campaigns with just a few keystrokes. But perhaps the best part about inbound marketing is the fact you don’t have to go out looking for potential customers; instead, by creating informative content, you bring the potential customers to you.

It’s hard to believe that something that didn’t exist 20 years ago is now part of the daily routine for nearly a billion people around the world – but that describes Facebook perfectly. The brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg has become a global phenomenon, with 936 million people using the social media platform on a daily basis. That means nearly one out of every seven people on the planet checks their Facebook at least once a day. Clearly, that’s an enormous audience you want a piece of.

Practically since the dawn of the internet, websites have been obsessed with traffic. How much traffic is enough? There’s no such thing. No matter how much traffic you have, you always want more. For a business, this equation is simple: more visitors means more potential leads; more leads means more potential sales; and more sales equals more money. That’s what you started this business for anyway, right?

It’s a question as old as time: how many of my leads should I be converting? The sales business is a hard slog, and salespeople need to develop a very thick skin. Few people are ever going to be rejected as much as the average salesperson is. It’s simply the nature of the beast. Potential customers are hesitant to trust sales pitches, and they are wary of products that sound too good to be true.

Inbound marketing is an exciting marketing strategy, which is cost effective and eminently adaptable. But it also has a lot of moving parts. Because of this, it can be easy to forget things from time to time. We’ve learned this the hard way here at Leap Clixx, and we don’t want you to have to do the same. So, let's look at what's important for an inbound marketing campaign:

4 Things to Remember When Running an Inbound Marketing Campaign 

Inbound marketing has a very specific formula: produce good content and it will attract leads (including more qualified leads). It’s a tried and true recipe for success that has worked for hundreds of businesses in many different fields.

In the business world, leads can be everything. They can be the difference between a bad month, a good month or a great month. You need leads to make sales, and you need sales to make money. And because of the nature of lead conversion, you’re going to need plenty of leads in order to have success. Most companies have a lead conversion rate that hovers around 2.35 percent – anything above 5 percent is considered exemplary. Think about that for a second: what other competition or field considers a 90+ percent failure rate to be a resounding success?

We live in a social-media dominated world, especially if you’re under the age of 40. Your friends are always tagging you on Facebook, you like to follow what Kim Kardashian posts on Twitter, and you never forget to post a childhood photo on Instagram for #ThrowbackThursday.

In order to fully understand how a lead becomes “sales ready,” it’s important to familiarize yourself with the concept of the buyer’s journey. HubSpot basically wrote the book (or should we say, the eBook?) on the buyer’s journey, and explains it thusly; every potential customer is in one of three stages of the journey: Awareness, Consideration and Decision. Each stage brings unique challenges, and there is a different marketing strategy for each stage of the journey. Let’s briefly break down how the three stages differ: