Let’s start with this: inbound marketingworks. And you don’t have to take our word for it. Behold:
- Inbound marketing costs 62% less per lead than traditional outbound marketing (source: HubSpot)
- Companies that use inbound marketing content platforms to offer buyer persona-driven content experience a 45% increase in the volume of Sales Accepted Leads (Source: Kapost)
- Properly executed inbound marketing is 10x more effective for lead conversion than outbound. (Source: Gartner)
However, inbound marketing isn’t a magic wand, silver bullet, or [insert your favorite metaphor here]. There are do’s and don’ts, rights and wrongs, best practices and big pitfalls.
While we’re a positive thinking bunch here at Leap Clixx, we thought it would be instructive to take a journey to the dark side of the force by revealing the top 5 inbound marketing mistakes that turn high expectations, into low (or no) results:
- Ignoring quality. Inbound marketing content like blog posts, ebooks, white papers, reports, and so on aren’t for Google and the other search engines. They’re for prospective customers. The content is unprofessional, unclear or just plain redundant, then instead of pulling prospects in it will push them away.
- Not being consistent. Sending out a flurry of content and then doing nothing for weeks or months at a time is a recipe for inbound marketing failure. Publishing a steady stream of content on a consistent basis is the only approach that works.
- Not having a strategy. While there are valuable insights that will come to light along the way (e.g. identifying new buyer personas), inbound marketing isn’t experimental. It’s strategic, which means that all content has to be mapped out in terms of: who its for, how it’s being distributed, and where it fits on the buyer’s journey.
- Not capturing and analyzing data. Many companies that have a reasonably robust inbound marketing program in place are nevertheless still tracking the same data they were 5 or 10 years ago, such as website traffic and referral sources. Inbound marketing allows for a much deeper and far more valuable analysis -- but this can only be leveraged with the right data capturing systems and tools.
- Going the DIY route. Unless a company has the in-house resources to run an end-to-end inbound marketing program – which includes setting up all automation flows and testing, testing and testing some more – then going the DIY route almost always ends badly. Instead of saving money and doing things faster, companies spend far more to get much less, and allow their non-DIY competitors to race past them.
Learn More
If your business is making one, some or perhaps all of these inbound marketing mistakes – or you haven’t yet started your inbound marketing journey and want to make sure you know where the pitfalls are – then contact the Leap Clixx team today. Whether you’re brand new to the inbound marketing world, or you want to get the measurable results you expected and were promised, we will help. It’s what we do.
For more information on inbound marketing best practices, download our FREE eBook:
Topics: Inbound Marketing
