Inbound Marketing is not just an area of ​​marketing: it involves a whole philosophy around attracting customers through the creation and dissemination of relevant content. This method provides solutions to the problems and needs of potential consumers and manages to attract them until they become customers and —why not— promoters of the brand.
The main pillar of Inbound Marketing is content. For it to work, a strategy must be created that includes various channels to attract prospects to your website. In this way, you will get people to turn to your business of their own free will.
However, it's not all about getting people to a website. It is essential to continue accompanying users and helping them throughout the sales process, and even after they have become customers.
A good strategy contains various marketing techniques that must be coordinated and analyzed permanently. Along the way, it is common to make mistakes of all kinds; but there are always ways to correct them.
Find out, in the following article, what are the most common mistakes in the Inbound Marketing process and learn what you should do to improve your performance.
How to take advantage of errors in the Inbound Marketing process?
The Inbound Marketing process focuses on the implementation of a relevant content strategy that allows potential customers to stay close to the brand while they move through the sales cycle.
Since there are so many components that must be taken into account, mistakes can be made at various stages of the Sales Tunnel . Analyzing the data and results is the first step in identifying potential failures.
Fortunately, mistakes can always be learned: you should take advantage of the experience to avoid making them again in the future.
Spot the mistakes
Inbound Marketing is a very powerful attraction tool due to the scope of its approach. However, if you want to use it profitably, you must work on each of the aspects that make it up to avoid failures that can cost you a lot of money.
Below, you will find the most common mistakes that are usually made when implementing an Inbound Marketing strategy.
The main pillar of Inbound Marketing is content. (highlighted phrase)
Not setting realistic goals
When designing a strategy, whether it is Inbound Marketing or another technique, it is very easy to get carried away by unrealistic or impossible goals.
Keep in mind that the goals are the support of a strategy: being able to measure the result will reveal whether the company is on the right track or not. A wrong decision can significantly harm the entire process.
A basic premise is that your objectives must be raised under the SMART principle «Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely». In Spanish, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and temporary.
- Specifics. The goal should be as specific as possible. “Increase website visits” is not helpful. More specific would be “Increase visits by 5% during the month of April”.
- Measurable. If exact goals are established, they can later be analyzed to measure the results.
- achievable. It is useless to set unattainable goals. The key is to go little by little, meeting small objectives to grow progressively.
- Relevant. If your goal is to increase web traffic by 5%, but you don't have a lead capture strategy in place , that goal won't work at all. The objectives have to serve to meet the ultimate goals of the company.
- Temporary. The objectives have to be raised with a specific date or time. If deadlines are not established, the tasks will be delayed and the work will be less productive.
Have a Buyer Person little worked
One of the typical mistakes of those who are just starting out in Inbound Marketing is having a buyer persona that has n't worked very well. Defining the profile of your ideal clients is a fundamental task to then create actions focused on them.
The process of defining the customer profile must be very thorough and as complete as possible. This will allow you to perfect the lines of your business, improve communication and achieve greater efficiency in marketing actions .
The Buyer Persona is a semi-fictional profile of your ideal client, based on real data. In addition to demographic data, this representation should talk about behaviors, habits, goals and challenges of the type of consumer you expect for your company.
The same company can create different customer profiles according to its target audience. In this way, you will be able to meet the needs of these people and satisfy them with your products and services.
Too much content and little quality
It is always better to have two or three high-quality articles a week than to publish every day and that the content is written without depth in the subject.
Writing quality material every day requires a large infrastructure, which most companies don't have. Quality is always more important than quantity.
Bad analytics of the Inbound Marketing process
The analysis of the metrics is one of the most important things in Inbound. Taking into account that this methodology has different phases, it is essential to measure each one of them to elucidate which one you are getting right and which one you are not.
Before adding new elements to your strategy, whether it is a new way of diffusion or a new way of converting leads, you have to see how you are going to measure the results.
As you build your Inbound Marketing strategy, you must follow and analyze all the parameters that you have established and compare the results with the goals set.
A healthy company analyzes its indicators weekly, monthly and annually. If you track too many metrics at the same time, you may lose focus on what's important: you need to analyze the specific metrics related to your goals.
If your goal is the optimization of your blog and the publication of new content, the metrics that you should analyze are the views of the posts, the percentage of clicks that have been made on the CTAs , the number of new leads and the traffic sources. . Where do users come from? Organic searches? Social networks?
However. If, for example, you have been working on email marketing , you should measure the click-through rates to email, because they are the ones that will allow you to know what content your audience wants to read.
When you find actions that work, you must replicate them. If things don't work out, you need to try something else. The more tests you do, the more knowledge you will gain.
learn to reverse them
The best way to reverse these common mistakes is by learning in depth how to apply Inbound Marketing in your company. From the creation of customer profiles to the content generated to attract people, everything must go through a careful process of design and analysis.
Find below how to improve your inbound strategy with this practical and useful information.
Defining the profile of your ideal clients is a fundamental task to then create actions focused on them. (highlighted phrase)
Know the person to whom you will write
Before you start writing your blog content, you need to answer a few questions: Who does your brand want to reach? Who do you produce content for? Who do you plan to communicate with? Who do you want to educate, entertain and convert?
There is no point in writing articles if you are not clear about who your potential consumers are, because without this information, there will be no way of knowing what data can help them solve their needs or problems.
For that, a profile must be created that has the main characteristics of the ideal clients. In this way, the company can develop effective strategies that meet their demands.
To create the buyer person, not only simple data such as age range or demographic data must be taken into account: it is necessary to deepen the investigation to outline what he does during the day, how he informs himself, what his greatest needs are and what he works for, for example.
This semi-fictitious representation of the ideal client can be created through interviews with current buyers, active listening on social networks and focus groups, among other actions.
Try to know their buying habits, their goals, their problems and needs. The more information you have and the more details you include, the more accurate the results will be.
Create quality content pieces
Quality content is key to getting consumers to identify with your brand. If you manage to position yourself as a reference in the subject matter to which your company is dedicated, you will be able to connect with your audience, expand your online presence and acquire new clients.
Try to create memorable content that surprises your readers. Having someone specialized in the subject can be a crucial difference when it comes to credibility. All this content has to be immersed in a global strategy in which the keywords, the metrics to be evaluated and the distribution channels are analyzed.
Establishing key performance indicators ( KPIs ) is crucial to analyze the process towards SMART goals. In this way, you can evaluate the performance of the published material to detect favorable and unfavorable actions.
Choosing the right broadcast channels is also crucial. This will largely depend on the profile of your audience. You can share content on social networks or through email marketing campaigns, for example.
Refine outcome measurement
The results must be measured continuously to know what works and what does not. Lack of follow-through is detrimental to growth as it hinders optimization processes and campaign adjustments.
Within digital marketing , there are many metrics and different performance indicators that allow you to easily, quickly, accurately and economically evaluate the results of your content strategy.
Working with exact data allows the strategy to evolve and contributes to achieving the stipulated goals. Depending on the medium you use, these are some of the main metrics to evaluate your Content Marketing actions :
Blogs or websites
- Visits on the page. This indicator will allow you to see how many and which are the most visited pages of your domain. Thus, you can identify which content is the most interesting to your readers.
- Unique visits. This metric will help you know the size of your audience. Through it, it is possible to know the percentage of new visitors and those who return to your content.
- Time spent on the page. It allows you to know the average time in minutes that visitors spend on each page of your website. You can discover if readers just come and close the page or if they stay longer to consume the material.
Through automated email marketing software such as Aweber, MailChimp or Infusionsoft, you can learn key data about your campaigns:
- Email opening . You can see how many people on your mailing list clicked to read the email you sent. You can also know data such as the most common opening hours. In this way, you can discover which topics are the most attractive to your readers and send them emails at the most convenient time for them.
- Clicks on emails. It allows you to verify who clicked on the links contained in your message (be it an e-book, a PDF or any material that you make available for download). With these insights, you can classify your mailing list according to various interests.
- Downloads or completed forms. One way to measure content consumption is to view the number of downloads your material has had. If a form needs to be filled out to get it, you can analyze how many people left their data on it.
From the information collected, you will be able to make more precise tests and identify the areas that need more attention.
Other key metrics in Inbound Marketing
In addition to the Content Marketing metrics —the pillar of the Inbound strategy—, you have to analyze other indicators in depth in order to improve and meet your goals.
Although it is essential to analyze the metrics, it can be a mistake to follow too many or choose the wrong ones: there are many parameters that can be measured in each aspect of Inbound Marketing.
For this reason, it can be very easy to get bogged down in so much data and lose sight of the most important ones. Below, you will find a list of the main Inbound Marketing metrics that you should use to have a complete picture of the health of your company.
Return on investment. ROI is the main metric that your company must take into account. It allows you to know if the marketing you are using generates profits or losses: all the investments in the area in a certain period are added up and compared with the results obtained. You have to consider the number of leads generated, the decrease in the sales cycle and the new purchases of active customers.
Conversion rate . This indicator lets you know how many people become leads and how many leads become customers. It shows to what extent your brand can convince about the value of its offers. If there is no conversion, there are no real results.
Funnel conversion. Looking at the conversion rates of each stage of the sales cycle will allow you to understand if there are problems in any of them in particular. Analyzing conversions in detail will make it easier to diagnose problems and fix them quickly.
Ratio between LTV and CAC. The LTV «Lifetime Value» is a metric that indicates, on average, how long each customer stays with your company. The CAC "Customer Acquisition Cost" shows how much the company spends to acquire each customer. For the financial health of a company, it is essential that the CAC be much lower than the LTV. Otherwise, the company would be spending so much to get customers that it would lose money.
With this data collected, you will be able to do more precise tests to identify the areas that need further attention to improve.
Setting performance indicators (KPIs) is crucial to analyze the process towards SMART goals. (highlighted sentence)
Conclusions
It is known that Inbound Marketing brings with it many reasons to implement it in your company. However, you should not forget that results are not achieved overnight. It is essential to make a permanent and constant measurement to be able to improve step by step until you meet all your objectives.
Remember that all errors can be fixed and that all actions can be optimized for the benefit of your business and your productivity.
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