It is a rather shocking headline, but nevertheless true. In fact, many of our clients come to us after attempting to implement parts of the Inbound Marketing framework (e.g., blogging, social media). They are disappointed and don't know where they went wrong. After asking a few questions and looking into their analytics, their website, and their blog, the causes are easily discovered.
Here are the top 10 reasons why your Inbound Marketing efforts can fail.
Inbound Marketing is a change of philosophy, not a bunch of tools. It requires full commitment from C-level management and the implementation of organizational changes that come with it like, for example, instituting a sensible social media policy, changing incentive programs to foster a culture of knowledge sharing, and giving employees the training, time, tools, and processes they need to create great quality content. Without executive buy-in, any Inbound Marketing will produce less than stellar results and end up in frustration.
We run into this all the time: Your marketing team assures you they are doing just fine without a blog. They are tinkering with cross-posting some pictures on social media. They are happily sending email blasts every week to all of your 5,000 contacts in your database. That is what they always have done and if it ain't broke, why fix it? Or you have the quick-and-dirty growth hackers who sign up for an expensive tool that offers some magic bullet solution that will turn your lead gen efforts into a drinking-from-a-firehose situation.
But you, as the CEO or VP of Marketing, see that this is not working as effectively as you need it to. To successfully implement an Inbound Marketing strategy, a lot of education and training will be necessary to convince even the last traditionalist of the tremendous benefits this change can bring to the organization. Otherwise, there will be resistance and reverting back to old "tried-and-true" tools like Google Analytics and Constant Contact.
Aligning all of your company's marketing efforts will not only protect the investment you make in Inbound Marketing, but will also nurture it. For example, if you are running an industry event or an educational webinar, you should use email marketing, blogging, and social media to promote it, and call to action and landing pages to capture the attendees. Or if you hire a PR agency to reach out to media and key influencers in your industry, your content marketing efforts should assist this campaign. And your PPC campaign should be based on extensive keyword research and lead to targeted landing pages rather than your homepage or a plain product page with no actionable next step your visitor should take.
Your Inbound Marketing strategy must be based on smart goals. For example, increasing traffic, getting more leads, or running five events a year are not smart marketing goals. Smart goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. An example would be increasing the visitor-to-contact conversion rate from 1.5% to 3% within the next 12 months by creating and promoting two new top-of-the-funnel offers for buyer persona B2B Tech Marketer Tom. Without these goals, you cannot measure your progress, track the performance of single efforts, and analyze which campaigns have the best return on investment.
Bad strategy or no strategy is a recipe for disaster. Sometimes Inbound Marketing is implemented as a quick-fix to an existing problem. One example is blogging to increase website traffic to an under-performing website that in reality has a lead generation problem. It requires careful planning, execution, and analysis. Pushing out a bunch of blog posts for 2 months — with no buyer persona in mind or conversion opportunities attached — will not get you the results that you are hoping for.
People go to the internet for two reasons: to be entertained (e.g., watch a video) or solve a problem (e.g., find a recipe for a quick family-friendly dinner, a cure for hair loss, or to compare car loan options).
Inbound Marketing uses the latter to draw in customers by answering those queries with helpful and educational content. For that reason, every Inbound Marketing effort starts and ends with researching and defining your buyer personas and the problems or challenges they are trying to solve.
This way you gather intricate knowledge about the customer persona's likes, dislikes, shopping habits, needs, keywords they use to describe the problems, social media preferences, and much more. You will also be able to define the buyer's journey (see below) — the steps everyone goes through to make a purchasing decision.
(Want to define your buyer personas? Download our buyer persona worksheet.)
Defining your buyer persona will allow you to tailor your content, your email marketing, social media, and blog posts to their interests, needs, and problems. Imagine you own a pet store. Your buyer persona is Tom, a young dad who is thinking about buying a puppy for his family. Tom will need to research what is involved in caring for a dog, what breed is friendly to kids, what food to feed it, and how difficult it will be to house train it (which is a big objection his wife has). He will need more information on the cost involved in buying all the things the dog will need etc.
If you address Tom with content about fish, cats, lizards, mice, hamsters, guinea pigs, and — oh yes — dogs too, he will be not as interested in your communication. But imagine that he finds your blog post "How To House Train Your New Puppy", clicks on the call to action below the blog post, downloads the eBook "The Ultimate Guide to Buying A Puppy", and then gets targeted emails from you to help him along in this buyer's journey. Not only will Tom be more inclined to purchase from you, but he'll do it faster and will be thrilled with your company!
Now just imagine how Tom would feel after excitedly reading your blog post about training puppies and then discovering that your only call to action is "Buy Now". It is inappropriate, as he is still deciding if he wants to get a puppy.
According to Gleastner Research:
In essence, 1 out of 4 leads you generate are ready to buy in the next 12 – 24 months; the other 75% need nurturing.
This means you have to offer content that addresses problems early in the buyer's journey in a format that allows your leads to experience self-paced learning without your direct involvement.
Closely related to the last one is not offering enough relevant opportunities for your visitors to convert into leads.
Recently, I had a conversation with a prospect who had good targeted traffic to his website, but his visitor-to-customer conversion rate was 0.1%! I suggested adding more top-of-the-funnel calls to action in addition to his already existing "Request A Quote" as most visitors are not ready to take that next step.
He challenged me by asking if that would take away from his other call to action. The truth is — yes, it probably would. If the only call to action you have is a very bottom-of-the-funnel button to request a quote, chances are that you will have many visitors click on it to see what the questions are, but not actually follow through by answering all of them, and then drop off. He was surprised and admitted that this is exactly what is happening.
So, by offering checklists, whitepapers, and even customer case studies early on, you are educating the people who have not yet decided to go ahead with the solution that your company is offering. And you have the chance to nurture them along the way.
Last but certainly not least: Not producing enough quality content on a consistent basis is the most common problem we see with prospects that come to us.
Inbound Marketing is presenting the right content to the right people at the right time, but here is how you will fail:
Inbound Marketing is not a magic pill. It needs strategic planning, integration into the entire organization, and careful execution. Make sure you are able and willing to implement Inbound Marketing before making the investment.