When done well, inbound marketing can help you attract new customers – and keep them for a long, long time. Inbound marketing truly can deliver a terrific return on your investment.
But as with most things when you’re first starting out, mistakes will be made. And that’s a good thing (we learn from our mistakes).
Yet when time and money are involved, you understandably want to keep those mistakes at a minimum.
Read below for five common inbound marketing mistakes and how to avoid them.
- Writing content about anything that pops into your head. This might be good. After all, you know your business and your perfect prospect better than anyone, right? Right? In fact, that’s key when it comes to inbound marketing: knowing your perfect prospect extremely well. That’s why it’s best to sit down and create a perfect prospect buyer persona (really, write it down) and the life cycle of your buyers. Doing so allows you to create content you know your perfect prospects/clients want.
- Deciding that keywords don’t matter anymore. While Google’s search algorithms have put the kibosh on keyword stuffing, keywords still matter. You need to do some keyword research to determine what keywords your prospects are using when they search for your products/services.
- Deciding that a blog takes too much time and too much effort. Blogging actually is the best type of inbound marketing strategy. A blog provides you great bang for your time and your money. Each time you add a new post to your website’s blog, the search engines index it. Which means that you have yet another chance to show up in search engine results. Google and other search engines love the new and as they see that you’re regularly adding new content to your site, they’ll crawl your site more frequently, just to see what new content they can rank.
- Not having any call-to-actions on your blog posts. Your posts can help you generate leads. That’s why you need to add a banner to the top or bottom of each post with a call to action. Or you could provide links in your post to landing pages for specific services or products, even other posts on our blog.
- Deciding that there’s too much to do, you can’t possibly do it all, so you decide to do nothing. Trust us on this: it’s really best to take inbound marketing step by step, and growing your efforts. There’s not need to feel you have to “do it all and all at once.” Instead, prioritize your efforts. We recommend that you start by blogging. Then focus on engaging with your followers on social media. Follow this by creating more great content for your website. Then start on e-mail marketing.