Often there are challenges a business faces at the start of their inbound marketing journey that can mean the difference between it being a good idea that never takes off to being a key part of their lead generation strategy that develops high quality sales qualified leads therefore increasing sales and profit.
Understanding the challenges a business faces in setting up and running inbound marketing campaigns and how to overcome them will help a business successfully implement it as a lead generation programme.
Lack of buy in
One of the main reasons for inbound marketing not working can be a lack of buy in throughout the business. Your marketing team may be used to working independently from your sales team and therefore getting them to cooperate can be critical to the success of new campaign. In addition to this, management systems can be expensive requiring capital outlay that finance teams may object to or HR may not let you recruit more team members to create resources.
To overcome a lack of buy-in can be relatively simple at the start. By getting all stakeholders together, outlining key business objectives and targets as well as how each team can support inbound marketing can mean the difference between success and failure. This means that by having shared objectives and goals the teams can work together to implement inbound marketing by sharing knowledge and ideas that will make it work for the business as a whole.
Lack of Resources
Inbound Marketing is a hungry beast to feed. For many companies it sounds like a great idea but when reality kicks in they realise that they are not going to be able to create multiple different campaigns as they just don’t have enough creative resources.
Having set realistic objectives for lead generation a business needs to look at the resources available to support the campaigns. Having the right type of content to funnel prospects through the customer journey and make them want to work with them can be a real challenge. It’s not just about sending an email or getting them to click on an online advert, you need content that covers all levels of the prospect journey including high quality awareness pieces through to relevant case studies to create desire.
Successful inbound marketing campaigning is often achieved by starting off with one or two small campaigns and then developing more as time and resources become available.
Content is King
For an inbound marketing strategy to work marketing teams must plan their content from the start. A business that just has one page on a subject with no corresponding resources or experience is unlikely to develop any high quality leads and then inbound marketing will quickly be seen as a failure.
In planning an inbound marketing campaign businesses need to identify relevant content, outline the user journey (either online or offline), prepare supporting materials and then continually update this as time goes on. Your prospects may have a long decision making cycle and if they constantly see the same thing they are unlikely to see you as the best to work with.
Having the right goals and objectives
Setting objectives is not a new concept but it is one of the key things that will make inbound marketing work for a business. Going back to basics and setting SMART objectives is a key to success.
Specific – Don’t be vague. For example, we want to increase sales by £100,000 in the next six months. Just saying we want to generate new sales leads is way off the mark.
Measurable – How will you judge if your campaign is successful (or running to plan). You need to consider other factors such as your win loss ratio, time to win business and even what your competitors are up to. Having a cash figure will help to measure success or failure but what about also looking at the number of sales qualified leads generated each month or even an increase in your website traffic. They are all measurable.
Achievable – Make objectives achievable for your campaigns. If you are just going to do a few emails and a couple of blogs you are unlikely to get 100 leads in the first month but maybe 1 or 2 high quality sales qualified leads is achievable.
Realistic - If you typically deal with one sort of customer a single inbound campaign is not going to change the whole make up of your client base so make objectives realistic and then you can build on success with later campaigns.
Timely – Inbound marketing needs to be given time to work. Results don’t happen overnight and it takes a great deal of effort to make them effective. When setting your objectives, you should set deadlines and timings otherwise things will never get done.
We understand the challenges faced by businesses wanting to develop inbound marketing campaigns from setting objectives through to creating content and improving website performance. If you would like to talk to us about your business and how we can help visit our inbound marketing page for more resources or complete the contact us form and we will get in touch with you.
Comentários