Why Inbound Marketing Might Not Be Working for You

Unless you've been living in a hole for a while (or this is your first visit to our blog), you may have noticed that we're a bit, uh, enthusiastic about inbound marketing.  And we give a ton of tips & advice to you about how to do it.  What I've noticed, however, is that it's easier than I expected to get inbound marketing just wrong.  You can put in the time and energy but still sligthly miss one or two essential things that are the difference between ho-hum and amazing results.  Diagnosing the problem and correcting it can make a huge difference in your results. 

For example...

• You're not getting leads.  Do you have a stunning, shiny call to action button? Yes.  Do you have a naked landing page with a short form and a sexy picture?  Yes.  So why aren't you getting conversions?  You don't have a quick description of what people will get when they fill out the form, so instead of getting leads, you get bounces.
  
  
• Your blog is a desolate, lonely place.   You've been blogging carefully away. You're using your long-tail keyword phrases strategically in your blog titles.  You're linking to other pages on your website with keyword phrase anchor text.  You have relevant calls to action at the end of each article, and you blog twice a week without fail.  Why isn't anyone subscribing to it?  Why don't you have any followers and only your mom has left a comment? Your blog is stuffed with sales content.  You haven't considered your prospects' interests or needs, and you're pretty much just tooting your own horn.
  
  
• Email marketing ROI? What email marketing ROI? You spend hours on each email marketing campaign you send.  You are very carefully reusing old blog content to provide perfect value to your prospects (and you haven't made the mistake in the last paragraph!).  You have engaging subject lines and people actually click on some of the links in the email.  But are you actually getting something from your efforts?  How can you justify the time you're spending?  By including calls to action.  Give your recipients something to do or to get for free (via a landing page, of course), and you'll discover that you're getting a lot of response from leads you thought were ice cold.  You'll even discover that you can measure your ROI.

These are only three examples of many.  Have you ever seen inbound marketing go from just okay to terrific?  How can we learn from your pain? 

Photo courtesy of Jean-Etienne Minh-Duy Poirrier.