While traditional marketing efforts are often still used in a number of contexts, inbound marketing has become a critical outreach method for businesses today. Inbound marketing draws in potential customers with your online content, broadening your reach and driving traffic to your website and products.
Sounds simple, right? Unfortunately, marketers and businesses often fall prey to common mistakes. Below, we list the mistakes that might be hurting your business, as the well as top inbound marketing tips to help you come out on top.
Major Inbound Marketing Mistakes and Tips
Poor Planning
The great thing about inbound marketing? You’re drawing in website traffic by sharing expertise and knowledge through good content , which is an excellent way to build and maintain a steady audience. The downside? You need to worry about managing content creation and sharing across a number of platforms – including social media, your website, and blog. Prioritize the networks that are currently working for you, and plan ahead for ways to optimize your presence on others. Don’t be tempted to overdo it on every platform available when starting out – you may find yourself quickly running out of content and unable to handle the workflow sustainably.
Skimping on Research
One of our most important inbound marketing tips is to know and understand your audience profiles , including what they are interested in and what content you need to create to reel them in. Check out your target audience’s social activity. What are they buying? How do they like to buy things? Use this information to help you plan your campaign. You don’t want spend time and effort creating content in bulk only to find out that your initial work alienates rather than attracts your audience.
Unclear Goals and Measurement
Far too many marketers forget to set up clear, defined goals for their inbound marketing campaigns. When you have a tangible goal (e.g. create X blog posts funneling to Y product), you can track your campaign’s effectiveness and make adjustments during the process, making it easier to assure clients that their budgets are well spent.
Being Spammy, not Reader-Friendly
Your website has to be optimized to draw in as many searches as possible—and there was certainly a time when keyword stuffing served its purpose aiding in that effort. However, consumers (and search engines) have gotten wise to the practice, and would rather direct traffic to content that is readable for a person, not a robot.
Ignoring the Blog
If you think blogging is a superfluous inbound marketing activity, think again! Not only are blog posts an opportunity for yet another webpage to be indexed by search engines, they’re also a great way of utilizing keywords (again – in a readable way, not stuffed).
Plus, when done right, your posts will contain valuable information that readers will be more likely to share across their social networks and beyond, thus increasing your audience even more.
Forgetting the Call-to-Action
Your content can be excellent, but if you don’t make it clear to readers what you want them to do after reading it, you may be missing out on possible conversions. Make sure all content has a clear call-to-action , pointing to your website, or at the very least, a place that readers can buy what you’re selling!
{{cta(‘cf0465fb-a314-4c54-bb5e-6554d93a6590′,’justifycenter’)}}
