Inbound marketing is the process of drawing leads to you passively, allowing you to focus on nurturing those leads towards a sale. Leads drawn in by these strategies tend to be better qualified than traditionally gained leads, and companies that use them tend to get way more leads than the ones that don’t.
If you plan to grow your business exponentially, you need to do it online. That means you need to understand the best way to make that happen. Sometimes, the easiest way to understand what to do is to learn what it looks like when you do it wrong.
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Inbound Marketing Strategies Are The Most Effective Marketing Available
Let’s talk about numbers for a minute. Inbound marketing is hugely effective for any size business. Dollar-for-dollar, inbound marketing is nearly 5 times as effective as traditional marketing tactics. It’s 62% less expensive than traditional outbound tactics. It also brings in 3x the leads.
That means, like most small business owners, inbound marketing is the best use of your marketing budget. After all, there’s no sense in not making the most of your marketing dollar. It could be the difference between growing and not.
Damaging Your Inbound Marketing Strategy Can Take A Long Time To Recover From
Here’s the warning though. If you take your inbound marketing strategy the wrong direction, it could take you a ton of extra time to come back from it. That’s not usually a situation that small business owners can afford.
The best strategy for your inbound marketing is to stay ahead to begin with. Learn what to do to make your inbound marketing effectively produce leads before you begin so you never have to play catch up.
If You Want To Keep Your Inbound Marketing Successful, Avoid These Mistakes
To help you build a successful inbound marketing strategy, I want to show you some of the biggest mistakes you can make. Like I said earlier, sometimes it’s easier to do things the right way when you know what the wrong way looks like. If you can avoid these, you’ll get on the right track much faster.
Produce Horrible Content
The worst inbound marketing mistake you can make is to produce bad content. When your content is boring, uninformative, poorly written, or just plain uninteresting, you’re never going to attract visitors to your site. That means you won’t have anyone to convert leads.
Take time with your content and make it worth reading. Be informative on the topics your target audience wants to know about. Answer the questions that they have. Make sure you’re also entertaining. Most people don’t have fun reading an encyclopedia.
Leave Calls-To-Action Out
If you’re producing great content, you’re on the right track. However, if you don’t give your visitors the next step, they’re going to leave. That’s the value of calls-to-action, which are one of the most overlooked pieces of the inbound marketing funnel around.
Every piece of content needs to contain a call-to-action. This “ask” is the way you direct your audience to take the next step down the buying path. It’s how you eventually work turn your visitors to leads and your leads into customers. Don’t forget to add one to every piece of content you produce.
Don’t Incentivize Visitors To Subscribe
With great content and great calls-to-action, your visitors have direction. Now you need them to stay in touch. But throwing a contact form isn’t enough. Unless they’re ready to buy, they need a reason to give you their information. If you haven’t given them one, then all the previous work is for nothing.
Create great lead magnets – including ebooks, whitepapers, and “swipe files” – then offer them in exchange for your visitor’s contact information. If you’re doing the job to create what they need, they’ll happily turn over their basic contact information in exchange.
Build An Inbound Marketing Strategy That Works
Inbound marketing is about leads. The bottom line is that a great inbound strategy needs a great lead funnel in place, great content being shared, and a plan to drive attention to that content. Once you’ve assured you have all the pieces in place, and you avoid the mistakes we talked about above, you’ll see leads start flowing in.
