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7 Inbound Marketing Mistakes Your Business Must Avoid

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Inbound Marketing|7 Inbound Marketing Mistakes Your Business Must AvoidAs the world continues to battle COVID-19 and continue with vaccination efforts, many business owners are left wondering how to promote their brands in a post-pandemic world. There’s no denying that inbound marketing is the way forward for many organizations.

After all, inbound marketing enables businesses to get a better marketing ROI and boost their bottom lines. However, some entrepreneurs aren’t doing inbound marketing correctly and end up wasting their time – and money.

You’re likely reading this article today because you want to make sure your inbound marketing efforts aren’t for nothing. With that in mind, take a look at these common mistakes that you must avoid the next time you launch an inbound marketing campaign:

1. Not Having a Strategy

It might surprise you to learn that many businesses end up with lackluster inbound marketing campaigns because they don’t have a strategy or plan. Instead, what they have done is throw some content out there and hoped for the best.

You shouldn’t ever launch an inbound marketing campaign without having a strategy in place first. In other words, you need to have clearly defined goals so you don’t lose focus and you can measure your results easily.

2. Not Having a Long-Term Plan

You may decide that you have a strategy and you’re planning to use B2B lead generation as part of your campaign. But, you only want to run your campaign for a short period. The thing is, your business is a long-term operation – not something that will stop next week.

Instead of chasing quick fixes to draw in more customers and generate brand awareness, you need to have a long-term plan for your inbound marketing campaigns. For example, how would you like to promote your products and services in the next 12 months?

3. Writing Lackluster Content

If your inbound marketing campaign involves directing people to your website, what do you think might happen if they look at your content right now? Will they feel impressed enough to follow through your CTAs, such as subscribing to a newsletter or buying something?

Or, will your audience take one look at your content, laugh, and forget your brand even exists? You need to make sure that you offer high-quality, relevant content for your prospects to read. It goes without saying that your content should also be engaging and valuable.

4. Not Focusing on Your Target Audience

The reason you are performing inbound marketing is that you want to attract a specific group of people. Your goal is to have them do something, like visit your website or give you a call and ultimately spend their money with you.
That sounds like a simple strategy. However, things become complicated when entrepreneurs, companies, and other organizations fail to focus on their target audience. Instead, they end up targeting the wrong people.

Make sure you have a clear focus with your inbound marketing campaigns. You need to know who it is you want to attract, and you must know why you want to attract them. It’s worth taking the time to understand your target market and what drives them.

5. Not Doing Any Research

It’s no secret that the key to any good outcome in life is by conducting the right level of research. The same concept applies to inbound marketing campaigns; you wouldn’t spend money on your marketing without researching what will return the best ROI.

With that in mind, you need to always conduct plenty of market research and determine which methods will work best for your business and niche. Don’t assume that certain marketing methods that work for someone else will automatically work for you too.

6. Forgetting to Analyze Your Results

It might shock you to learn that many companies spend money on their inbound marketing campaigns yet fail to do any proper results analysis. They might see an increase in sales or interest in their brands, but they don’t understand how or why that has happened.

That’s why it makes sense to conduct plenty of results analysis to ensure your inbound marketing campaigns are working. When you analyze the results, you can then tweak your campaigns by making the right adjustments for an increased ROI.

7. Not Having a Social Media Focus

Lastly, did you know that some companies spread themselves too thin across social media platforms by signing up to literally all the leading social networks? When they do that, they don’t realize that they’ll need a team of people to manage all those social media profiles.

Sign up to the social networks that you feel will significantly benefit your business. Don’t spend your time signing up to all new or obscure social networks, hoping to cast a wider net to your target audience.

Lead Generation Tips for Start Ups

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article | Lead Generation Tips for Start UpsStarting a business isn’t easy work. You can have the greatest idea ever and the best product that exists on the market. Still, if you don’t have leads, you won’t sell a single product. And, it’s no secret that without making sales, even the best business won’t survive.

Therefore, generating a steady supply of new leads and building a pipeline is vital in developing a profitable business. Yet, this is by no means an easy process. In fact, generating leads can be especially difficult for startups for various reasons. For instance, startups often have limited resources, including money and time resources. In fact, nearly 61% of B2B marketers put the blame on lack of resources, including staff, funding, and time, as the toughest challenge to successful lead generation.

Also, they have no reputation at all, so no positive word-of-mouth, no referrals, no testimonials, and no social proof. At the same time, they are competing with brands with a well-established customer base.

But that’s not all! As the lead generation experts from Drip Digital explain, “Perhaps the biggest challenge in generating leads is that startups have no experience with it. And, with lead generation, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy. A strategy that works great for others won’t necessarily work for you as well. Only by gaining experience, you will be able to look back and identify what works to attract leads for your startup and what doesn’t.”

Now, generating leads includes two main strategies: outbound and inbound. Yet, the point is that both have their own specific strengths and weaknesses. Ideally, your startup will use a little bit of both. However, when you’re just getting started, you might need to prioritize one over the other.

Feel confused yet? Don’t worry! We’re here to explain everything to you and share with you the tips you need to improve your lead generation.

Lead generation explained

First things first, in case this is the first time you ever hear about lead generation, we’ll quickly explain what lead generation is to make sure we’re on the same page as far as terminology goes.

Leads are basically people who have demonstrated interest in your business in some way. Basically, everyone who has given you their contact info, be it to attend your webinar, to download your free guide, or to sign up for your newspaper, is a lead. This person has engaged your business and has given you permission to contact them.

Now that you know exactly what leads are, the name “lead generation” is pretty self-explanatory. It is basically the process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into leads.

So, how do you get leads you need to increase your revenue and exceed your goals?

Outbound lead generation strategies

Outbound strategies are pretty much all about reaching out to your prospective leads in order to engage them and transform them into actual leads. Outbound strategies usually include tactics such as door-to-door sales, cold emailing, and pay-per-click advertising. Outbound strategies include many tactics, both from offline and digital.

Now, outbound strategies generally require a more significant financial investment compared to inbound strategies. Yet, they can often deliver quicker results. So, how do you plan an effective outbound campaign?

Define your leads

What does your potential customer want? Once you’re able to answer this question and tie it to a high-converting landing page, that’s the moment when you’ll consistently generate leads.

It’s no secret that if you want to reach out to customers, you need to know who they are and what they want. In fact, this is one of the most common mistakes made by startups: they believe that what they’re selling is for everyone. So, don’t try to appeal to everyone but rather target a specific audience to tailor your campaign for.

If you already have a base of customers, that’s a great place to start to know them better. If not, don’t worry, you can learn more about your prospective leads by researching your competitors’ customers and analyzing their online activities.

Find your leads

Once you know who your prospective leads are, it is time to find them.

Now, you could buy lists of prospects, but this is not a safe bet because the quality of these lists can vary greatly. You may be paying for out-of-date emails and incorrect information. So, it makes much more sense to build your own list.

Hopefully, you found out enough information about your prospective leads to get an idea of where they might be spending their time. For example, if your target audience is Gen Z, they’re probably spending a lot of time hashtagging on Instagram. So, no need to waste your time and efforts anywhere else.

In other words, based on what you know about your leads, figure out where you can find them online.

Reach out to your leads

Now that you know who they are and where they are, it is time actually to reach out to your leads. You can use tactics such as cold calling, cold emailing, and social selling. Yet, keep in mind that each has its weaknesses and strengths. For example, while cold calls might be interrupting, it can be more effective at getting quick decisions. Social selling might take longer, but can help you build relationships with the prospects before you reach out to them.

Inbound strategies

Alternatively, you can also use inbound strategies that are all about creating value for your leads and offering it to them to attract them. Inbound strategies include forms of content such as blog posts, ebooks, and webinars, and video content. Pretty much all types of content that brings value to your prospective leads.

With Inbound strategies, things are different in terms of how you capture your leads. You don’t reach out to them directly but rather attract them to you. And, to do this, you have to create valuable content, share it, and finally capture your leads.

The most important step for your inbound strategies is creating valuable content. Yet, to create relevant content, you need to know who the ideal customer is. So, knowing your customer and tailoring your inbound strategies is just as important as it is for your outbound strategies.

Inbound Strategy Vs Outbound Strategy: Which Is Better For Your Business?

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article | Inbound Marketing |Inbound Strategy Vs Outbound Strategy: Which Is Better For Your Business?When it comes to marketing your business, your strategy will depend on so many things, but ultimately it can be separated in to two types of strategies – both of which are great for business, but are implemented in different ways and usually at different times in your business.

These strategies are inbound marketing and outbound marketing, and before we go into the benefits of each strategies, we’re going to explain a little about what each is and and overview of how they work.

An inbound strategy is typically what you’d call a long-game strategy in that it can be implemented right at the beginning of your business, but it can take a while to see results and it’s something that’s going to continue to be implemented throughout the duration of you running your business.

Examples of an inbound marketing strategy in action would include things like content marketing, your website and social media – these are all things you have out there that allow people to come to you by finding your marketing material, so it’s obviously something that takes a little time to build up.

An outbound strategy on the other hand is something that tends to see quicker results and is usually not something that will be implemented consistently in your business, but will be something that you’ll do every once in a while or especially at the beginning of your business.

Examples of outbound strategy in action would be something like you’ve just started a service-based company where you provide professional writing services for the medical industry and since your first priority is to get clients then part of your outbound strategy is to create a cold outreach campaign to places like hospitals, medical credentialing companies, and other medical industry companies that you could write for.

As mentioned above, each strategy works great, but they both have their time and place, and each also is better to implemented depending on how much time you have in your business to spend on marketing. Outbound is going to see faster results over a shorter period, but inbound will see consistent results over a longer period and can be a great way to plan your growth in terms of customers and revenue, so below we’re going to list some of the benefits of each strategy to help you see which one is best suited to your needs right now.

Inbound:

  • Helps you establish trust and credibility with your audience over a longer time;
  • Is usually great for SEO and organic reach since you’ll be creating a lot of content;
  • Can be automated to run over longer periods of time, so it doesn’t require so much attention.

Outboud:

  • Great for getting yourself known quickly;
  • A great way to build confidence when selling;
  • One of the fastest and most effective ways to get new clients fast.

Hopefully this post has provided you with a little clarity on the differences between these two strategies and helped you see which one could potentially be best for you depending on your business needs right now.