While no one is perfect, mistakes made when starting or growing a business can lead to an immeasurable loss.
While you’re unlikely to establish an inbound marketing strategy without experiencing some challenges along the way, knowing what costly mistakes to avoid is the first step towards establishing an effective marketing strategy.
Read on to learn the common inbound marketing mistakes you should avoid.
1. Lack of a Clear Marketing Plan
Obviously, the lack of planning leads to failure. Inbound marketing, just like other traditional marketing strategies will only work if you have a clear inbound strategy.
It is, therefore, unfortunate that some marketers in the B2B business setup don’t have a well-established marketing plan. A large percentage of businesses have little knowledge regarding inbound marketing and its specifications.
Many businesses with ineffective inbound marketing think that they can get leads by just publishing some blog posts and posting them on different social media platforms. Some even have no idea where to start.
Inbound marketing is so complex and it involves content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing. When done right, these strategies can help create brand awareness, generate leads, and convert them to customers.
To get the much-desired results, you need to have a clear inbound marketing plan for your business and reasonable goals.
While knowing that you need a strong online presence and boost sales are good, you need not stop there. You should aim at creating specific, measurable, reasonable and achievable goals.
You’ll also need to identify the persona in your business. Consider your customer’s values, demographics, challenges, behaviors, and goals. Be sure to have a more detailed buyer persona to ensure that your inbound marketing efforts align with your buyer persona.
2. Taking Shortcuts
Are you among the business owners who like taking shortcuts when it comes to promoting your products or services? Are you usually tempted to take inbound marketing shortcuts, for instance, buying social media followers, email lists, product reviews, etc.? Do you think that these numbers would help generate more leads in your business? Then you need to think again.
While you can succeed in fooling your target audience with your “fake” social media followers and likes, they’ll eventually catch up with you.
When they do, both your existing and potential customers might be deterred. What’s worse, it can significantly hurt the reputation of your brand.
The same would happen when you buy email lists. Popular email service provides, for instance, Yahoo and Gmail have put measures to protect their users from businesses that use purchased email lists when promoting their products or services.
This might mean that all your time and efforts put in creating these email content will end up in the Spam or Junk folder. What’s worse, these providers may flag your email’s domain.
3. Neglecting Quality Over Quantity
We all know the importance of publishing frequent and consistent content towards promoting an inbound marketing campaign. However, it is important to remember that these blog posts can only make sense if they include quality content.
Most companies release much content without considering the quality of the content they’re publishing.
People are more interested in quality and not quality. The content that you publish on your blog should be entertaining, educating, and problem-solving. Failure to focus your content on these categories might make you lose readers, leads, and customers no matter the amount of content you’re publishing.
4. Lack of a Blog
Despite knowing how important blogging is when it comes to inbound marketing, some companies don’t have their own blog, or just don’t blog at all.
Yes, your site is just a small percentage of the numerous marketing channels you can apply in your inbound marketing efforts, but failure to have a blog on your website can have far-reaching effects on your inbound marketing campaigns.
While blogging on sites such as LinkedIn can help boost traffic on your website, the content you’ll be publishing will be subjected to their terms and conditions. Imagine what happens if, for any reason, these platforms decide to close your account? In addition to losing your content, the possibility of driving traffic to your website will be hurt.
Besides, third-party sites are benefiting more from your blogging activities than your business. You’re offering these sites with a new page that search engines such as Google can index and rank anytime you publish new content on these platforms.
You can avoid these by transferring all your blogging activity to your website. This way, you’ll give search engines more pages to index and rank your website.
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