Everyone’s heard that developing an inbound marketing strategy can be beneficial to your lead generation efforts and the overall success of your marketing endeavors. Regardless of how much time, money and effort you allocate into your inbound marketing tactics, getting the results you want requires an immense amount of commitment. It’s important to continually measure your marketing tactics and channels so that you can focus your efforts on what’s working, and make improvements to what isn’t. Staying on top of this puts you in the best position to see results!
Whether you’re just starting out or been working on your inbound marketing strategy for awhile, it can be frustrating if you aren’t seeing results. In this article, we will dive deeper into some of the reasons as to why your inbound marketing strategy might not be working. Just because you might not be getting the results you want, it doesn’t mean that inbound marketing isn’t for you and you should give up. As with anything, it takes time, as well as trial and error to get it right.
5 Reasons Why Your Inbound Marketing Strategy Isn’t Working
It’s important to take a closer look at what types of inbound marketing campaigns you’re currently utilizing, and determine which ones are working better than others, and vice versa. Once you’ve determined which tactics don’t seem to be producing the results you expected, in order to improve, you need to take it a step further and find out why.
1. Goals aren’t SMART.
Let’s start with your goal strategy. I’m sure by now you’ve heard the term “SMART” goals. A SMART goal is specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. One of the most important aspects of goal-setting is to make sure that they are a combination of all these five things. Without matching specific numbers to your goals like profit amounts, time frames, number of leads generated, etc., it’s almost impossible to know if you are hitting your goals. Instead of making general goals like “increase leads” or “improve SEO”, you need to create more specific metrics that you can measure on a regular basis. For example, a good SMART goal would be to increase website visits by X% during X period of time.
2. Goals are outdated.
To piggyback on the SMART goals, it’s important to ensure that your goals are relevant and timely. The goals you had a few years ago, or even last year, may not be the right goals for you today.
Are you launching a new product or service, or do you want to reach a new target audience? The goals you set to achieve this new mission will be slightly, or even vastly different than those you set when you first started your business. By taking some time to reassess your goals periodically, you can ensure that you remain on track to achieve the objective at hand.
3. Inconsistent Measuring.
In order to analyze your inbound marketing data, you need to make sure you’re keeping track of your statistics in an organized and consistent manner. Your monthly data will vary depending on whether you started your campaign on the 1st or the 5th of the month, so it’s important to keep track of your start and end dates.
It’s also important to measure equal time periods, so you have something to compare it against. If you are comparing a week’s worth of data to last month’s data, it will be much more difficult to determine the reasons for increases or decreases in website visits and conversions, since the time period is significantly different. You should also determine additional factors that are affecting your inbound marketing efforts when measuring your data. If you implement several different marketing strategies all at once, both inbound and outbound, it’s important to understand how they may impact each other.
4. Undefined Target Audience.
If you don’t have a thorough understanding of your potential customers, it will be significantly more difficult to reach your intended audience. By taking the time to get to know what your customers want, like and need, and how they prefer to receive information, you can increase the success rate of your efforts.
It’s also important to understand that your customers will likely fall into a few different categories, or personas, and you’ll need to market to each separately. If you aren’t focused on creating a personalized user experience based on your target audience, then your efforts may not be as effective.
5. Team Isn’t in Sync.
It takes a lot of time and effort to plan and execute an effective inbound marketing strategy, which means you likely have several people working on your campaigns at once. Does everyone understand how their piece of the strategy fits into the whole campaign objective?
It is crucial that everyone communicates regularly about how each campaign piece is performing, since they will all ultimately impact each other. You don’t have to spend hours meeting to discuss numbers and status updates, but checking in regularly is a good idea.
Do your team members have the resources they need to successfully run their pieces of the campaign? Are you getting close to hitting your goals, or do they seem unreachable? By checking in with everyone on a consistent basis, you can get idea of how your inbound marketing efforts are going, and make adjustments as necessary to improve your results.
Key Takeaways
These are just some reasons why your inbound marketing efforts might not be performing as well as you had hoped. Whether your issues are stemming from one or all of the above potential campaign issues, the most important thing to remember is that you don’t have to fix everything at once.
The first step is to identify where the issues lie, and then slowly work towards fixing them with the time and resources you have available. You won’t see a drastic change in results overnight, but in time, you should see a significant improvement in your inbound marketing results.
