Are You Putting Enough Into Inbound Marketing?
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Inbound marketing has become an epidemic. Why is that? Because it reaches today’s consumers. And in a world of digital, fast, immediate, image, content, tech this and tech that – inbound marketing is the business world’s saving grace.
Outbound marketing was our primary tool in the heyday of billboards, magazine ads and TV commercials. But now, outbound marketing takes you to a lost paradise, the islands of misfit communication, where advertisements blow away like a silent wind. Inbound marketing takes you to a treasure trove, where a million fanatically curious internet users are chomping at the bit.; and you have the ability to provide some of the juiciest bate. Inbound marketing is easily the smartest and most effective way to reach your audiences today. So why do most inbound campaigns crash and burn?
Because marketers don’t do them or view them the right way.
We get it. Inbound marketing is still practically an alien method. To some generations, Facebook is still considered an alien invention. The internet might as well have three heads. The entirety of modern technology can be considered a wild, unpredictable ride through space and time.
Many aspects of the digital age are still lost on many people, so the methods of inbound marketing can seem like anther language to traditional marketers. But whipping up an inbound campaign with the wrong attitude is like baking a cake using a microwave. You’re not going to produce a cake, and you’re wasting a ton of valuable ingredients. The thing is; you’ve got to realize you’re doing something wrong before you can fix the problem. You’ve got to see that the microwave is the wrong appliance, before you can understand why your cake is mush.
Before meddling around in specific tactics, you need to examine your marketing approach on a broader spectrum. Are you looking at inbound marketing through an outbound lens? The mistake of most first-time inbound marketers lie in 3 crucial, but commonly neglected, components of inbound marketing: patience, persistence, and education.
Slow And Steady
Because inbound marketing is so complex, but appears so straight forward, (you just create an account and start posting, right?) companies make the mistake of treating it like a regular old ad campaign.
Inbound marketing is not a quick, classic, visible return on investment. You don’t post something on Facebook and wait for sales to increase. Inbound marketing doesn’t work like outbound marketing, which is why so many campaigns fail.
Inbound marketing is all about long term; long term planning, long term efforts, long term relationships, long term customer loyalty. You see? It’s less “bang” and more “steady buildup.” That’s where your patience comes in. Great things take time and continued effort, which brings us to the next essential component of a successful inbound campaign.
Persistence Pays Off
And you’ll need plenty of it to master inbound marketing. Sometimes your campaign will struggle. Sometimes it will sink. You can go down one day and have the wind behind your sails the next. The important thing is that you catch the tides turning, re-strategize, and make sure you’re riding the next wave – which could be in the next ten minutes.
Your campaign needs constant supervision, because that’s how quickly online trends shift. These fluctuations, paired with the long-term ROI of inbound marketing, means you need a professional team tracking your campaign at all times. Not a manager, not an intern, not you (that is unless you’re the CMO or Marketing Director, then yes, YOU). When you care about something, you invest in it, right? Your inbound campaign is no different – what you put in, you’re going to get out. If you handle marketing on your lunch break, or hire an intern to maintain it, you are minimizing the entire practice of inbound marketing. You’re investing $20 and expecting miracles. Two hours and expecting legacies. Nothing impactful ever came from cutting corners.
Invest more money, and assign the tasks of online marketing to a team who knows what they’re doing, has the time, energy and expertise to supervise your campaign 24/7, and can produce results. One of the reasons business owners burden themselves, or their colleagues, with online marketing, is because they believe it’s a fairly simple task. They are un-educated about the intricacies of inbound marketing, which brings us to:
Study Up
Inbound marketing is a wild animal you need to make uniquely yours. It’s not really comparable to past methods of marketing These are different type of relationships you’re forming, different mediums you’re speaking through. The strategies of inbound marketing should really be studied through a magnifying glass, zoomed out bit by bit, until it feels like you’re looking over an entire city. Then, and only then, can you zoom back in again and feel confident using any of the tools. There’s an entire world to navigate first.
Don’t keep wasting time, money and energy on a stagnant campaign. You have a new philosophy to learn, and new practices to embrace. Bring in the right people to do the right jobs, and watch your campaign lift off the ground and soar above the competition. Click below if you’re ready and willing to put more into your inbound campaign.
September 30, 2017
