Why Inbound Marketing Is Difficult For Individual Companies

Hubspot is the top name in inbound marketing. They offer software that gives companies the opportunity to run their own inbound campaigns and there is an endless supply of educational material from Hubspot on how to handle inbound marketing.

The concept of inbound marketing is great, we agree and work with several Hubspot clients, but we have to admit, it isn’t necessarily easy to do. Inbound marketing requires a company to cover many bases. The results are worth it, the savings in time and money are worth it, but for some – actually many- the skills needed are many and the road to inbound marketing success is long.

Initially, the concept of inbound marketing seems fairly simple: 1)provide site visitors with incentives to give you their name and email address, making that visitor a sales lead. 2)Then take this business lead and nurture it through segmented targeted email nurturing, until it becomes a marketing qualified lead so that it can be turned over the the sales force while the lead is most eager to buy your product and / or service. 3) Help close the lead with lead intelligence and the ability to continue to email nurture the lead into a profitable customer.

Here are some of the key deliverables of an Inbound Marketing campaign:

For starters a company needs to put in a big portion of time to research the industry, the personas, the keywords, competitors and social activity. This alone requires skill to understand how to do all of this research and what the results mean for the company.

Next, the company has to plan their content, schedule, hire necessary help, set up tracking and implement some type of task system to keep everything in order. Now the work begins. Content can now be generated. It should be optimized for search engines. Each piece needs to have images to split up the text and one generated for use on image sites like Pinterest.

Other factors in each post should also be addressed such as, Calls to Action. Calls to Actions should be created and tested, compared and changed regularly to see what works best. Each Call to Action will send visitors to specific landing pages. Landing pages should offer some kind of offer /  giveaway, additional knowledge or an offer that encourages the user to submit their information.

Upon submission they should immediately receive their download and become part of an email marketing campaign to turn the lead into a sale. On the thank you page visitors should get the chance to ‘like’ the company on a variety of social media sites. Sharing should also be part of the emails to help sharing your valuable material with like minded individuals. This will help begin the cycle again with a potential new stranger entering your site.

Marketing and marketing automation helps, but usually cannot make that final sale, so their finally the time that this lead is placed into their hands. But marketing automation continues to help the sales process, with its ability to track data. See 5 Ways Inbound Helps Market a Service Business

The trick is to keep the most information possible on each of the qualified business leads and what action they have taken. What blog posts are doing best, what Calls to Action need to be changed? Are people leaving comments or visiting the landing pages? What are the conversion rates on the landing page, on c

Calls to Action? Where is the source that most traffic is from? How can you get more traffic? Automatic reports ought to handle most of these requirements.

But things are always changing so good marketing people need to know:

• What changes Google has made
• What social media sites are providing the best return on activity
• What new systems Hubspot has put in place to make inbound marketing even more effective.

The Problem:

Most individual companies do not have the staff to easily manage all of the moving pieces of inbound marketing. It requires experts who do it everyday, people who see the same type of data over and over and know what it means, what needs to be changed and how to implement those changes quickly.There simply isn’t enough time in the day for one person to handle all aspects of inbound marketing because it involves several specialties and years of experience. See: Create an Inbound Marketing Plan.

Summary:

Hubspot understands the potential for difficulty in implementation and not having the right people power to manage their own inbound marketing campaigns. We understand your struggle with implementing this amazing concept to improve sales and we’d love to talk to you about any problems you are experiencing with inbound marketing- even if you have no intention of hiring us. We are inbound marketing champions and love being a part success stories. Give us a chance to show you how we can help, no obligation.