7 Mistakes that Can Derail Your Inbound Marketing Campaign

Everyone makes mistakes. But when it comes to starting and growing a business, these errors can easily mean wasted time, effort, and resources.

While it’s impossible to ever come up with an inbound marketing strategy without even the slightest hiccup, learning the what are the most detrimental inbound marketing mistakes is the first step to learning how to avoid them from happening to in your business.

Inbound marketing mistake #1: Not having a clear inbound marketing plan

Benjamin Franklin said it best: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”

Just like traditional outbound marketing strategies, you need first to have a clear inbound marketing strategy for it to work. Yet, only 32% of B2B marketershave a well-documented content marketing plan while 49% of businesses are doing some form of digital marketing without a concrete strategy.

One reason why this is the case is that, sadly, many businesses don’t fully understand what inbound marketing is and what it entails. In fact, many companies that failed in their inbound marketing campaigns believe that inbound marketing is just a matter of publishing a few blog posts, distributing them in different social media channels, and then only sitting back and waiting for the leads to start coming their way.

Another reason is that they have absolutely no clue on where to begin. Inbound marketing is a comprehensive strategy that combines content marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing. Each of these can help build brand awareness, generate leads, and convert leads into customers. On top of this, there are many different inbound marketers out there, each advocating one particular inbound marketing facet as the best and fastest way to get results, leaving many business owners scratching their heads in sheer confusion.

Finally, many businesses don’t have a clear and well-documented inbound marketing plan is because they have no clue what they want to accomplish. They view inbound marketing more like another popular tactic that they’d like to try for a while and see how it goes. 

How to fix this:

As you may have probably guessed, the best way to solve this is by creating an inbound marketing plan for your business, starting by setting clear, measurable goals.

Saying that you need to build a strong brand online or that you need to boost sales is a good start, but it should not end there. You need to make sure that your goals are SMART goals, meaning that your goals must be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. I talk about this in more detail in my blog post on lead generation strategies. If you need help to create your SMART goals, be sure to check that out.

Next, you’ll need to determine who your business’ buyer persona is. Simply put, a buyer persona is a semi-fictional person that represents your ideal customer’s demographics, values, behaviors, challenges, and goals. Since all of your inbound marketing activities should be aligned to attract your buyer persona, it's essential to make sure that you be as detailed about creating your buyer persona as possible.

Once you’ve got your buyer persona, you can now start planning your inbound marketing strategy. You can download my inbound marketing checklist to get some ideas on how to write up your own inbound marketing plan.

Inbound marketing mistake #2: Always going for the shortcuts 

Business owners love to get quick results when it comes to promoting their products or services. That’s why it can be very tempting to use a couple of “inbound marketing shortcuts” like buying reviews, social media followers and likes, and email lists, especially if you’re just starting your business. After all, boosting these numbers would make your business more appealing and will attract more leads, right? Wrong!

Although you may be able to initially fool your target customers with your artificially inflated social media followers and engagement, it's only a matter of time when they will discover the truth. When that happens, it can actually deter your potential customers and even some of your existing customers. Worse, this deception can damage your brand's reputation, which can be extremely difficult to repair.

The same thing is true when it comes to buying email lists. Many email service providers like Gmail and Yahoo are exceedingly vigilant in protecting their account holders from companies that are using purchased email lists in promoting their products and services. Most—if not, all—of the emails that are sent to those that are included in these lists are immediately sent into the Spam or Junk folder, and your email’s domain will be flagged by these email providers. That means that all the time and effort you gave to create your email’s content just went to waste.

How to fix this:

Since you’re willing to spend a bit of money, why not invest this instead to outbound marketing strategies alongside your inbound marketing campaign? 

It’s true that inbound is more efficient than outbound marketing, that doesn't mean that you need to disregard outbound marketing completely. On the contrary, supplementing your inbound marketing plan with some outbound marketing strategies like sponsored ads, PPC advertising, and display advertising can give you the "quick wins" you need as you grow your business because these will help make your website more visible and easily found by your target market. Once they get to your site, you can then start nurturing them through inbound marketing. 

Inbound marketing mistake #3: Your website doesn’t have a blog

Surprisingly, there are many business owners that either blog using another platform like Medium or just don’t blog altogether.

While it’s true that your site’s blog is just one of the many marketing channels to use in your inbound marketing campaign, not setting up a blog on your own website can limit your inbound marketing success.

For starters, blogging on a site like Medium or on social media sites like LinkedIn means that your content is subject to their terms and conditions. Yes, blogging in these platforms can help drive traffic to your website. But if the owners of these platforms decide to take down any one of your posts or close down your account entirely for whatever reason, you lose not just your content, but your ability to drive traffic to your website to generate leads that you can convert into customers.

More important, your blogging efforts are benefitting these third-party sites more than your business’ website. That’s because each time you create a blog post here, you’re providing these sites with a brand new page that Google and other search engines can index and rank while your business’ website starts to become dormant as far as search engines are concerned.

How to fix this:

Transfer all of your blogging activity to your own website. Not only will you have more control over your content, but you're now giving search engines more pages in your website to index and rank. These will, in turn, help make your site easier to find.

Most—if not, all—of the popular content management systems (CMS) like Wordpress and Hubspot allow you to easily incorporate a blog into your site even if you don’t know a single HTML code.

You can, of course, continue publishing content to these third-party platforms. However, I would recommend that you use these as a place to post your repurposed content to help your website rank higher in search engines.

Learn more about the remaining four mistakes that can derail your inbound marketing campaign here.