by ryan4 Questions You Should Ask When You Can’t Get the Desired Inbound Marketing Results
Inbound marketing is often a powerful tool when deployed as part of a great marketing campaign. When properly designed and implemented, it can help you develop your brand and increase your revenue.
Unfortunately, even the most well-thought plans will sometimes prove ineffective. If your inbound marketing efforts are not achieving the intended results, the following questions can help you figure out how to improve.
1. Do You Have Clear and Specific Goals?
Small businesses and huge corporations have similar overarching goals –to increase their bottom line and market share. However, several vital milestones must be achieved first.
If you want to succeed with inbound marketing, you have to set specific objectives. For instance, you can set goals for the conversion rate you intend to achieve through your blog. Similarly, you can set goals around the number of new customers you want to win.
However, any of these goals must be easy to track. If they aren’t, you’ll never know if you are making any progress. And this could be the reason why some of your inbound marketing efforts are not working. But when you ensure your goals are SMART, you can design appropriate strategies to achieve the goals within the provided timeframe.
2. Do You Understand Your Customers?
The buyer persona is a crucial part of any inbound marketing campaign. If you don’t have accurate personas for your customers, the chances are that your marketing message will fail. Typically, it is quite difficult to convince an audience you don’t understand.
Whether you have one persona or multiple personas, it must inform and guide each stage of your inbound marketing efforts. The buyer personas determine what you will write in emails and blog posts.
Primarily, buyer personas are not just endless lists of demographic information. They must include profiles of individuals: who they are, what they do, and what they care most about.
The idea behind buyer personas is to clearly understand how your customers think so you can determine what they want. Armed with this information, you are in a better position to offer them what they need.
After compiling accurate buyer personas for your target customers, you can create content that resonates with them.
3. Is Your Inbound Marketing Strategy Data-Driven?
It would be nice if inbound marketing were a “set it and forget it” solution. But it isn’t easy to achieve results if you are not keeping tabs on your metrics. Basically, you need to understand what is working and what to adjust.
If you built your site using HubSpot COS, the data analytics is built into your dashboard. Here, you get access to detailed reports and analytics. And if your website is created with a tool like WordPress, you can still embed a HubSpot tracking code and get similar insights. Alternatively, you can use Google Analytics to generate metrics.
By checking and monitoring your metrics, you can set measurable and timely goals. And once you kick-start your inbound marketing strategy, you track the data and determine if you are making any progress.
4. Is Your Website Optimized for Conversions?
It’s possible to have an active blog, a social media presence with tons of followers, plenty of web traffic, and still record mediocre conversion rates. If you’ve ever found yourself in this situation, then your website optimization may be the culprit.
If you want to optimize your website for conversions, you have to know exactly what visitors are doing on your site. You can leverage a service like Hotjar. This tool records visitor activity, logs, clicks and creates heat maps of specific parts of the website that a visitor interacts with.
But it’s vital to allow Hotjar to run for some time before you start implementing changes on your website. Once you have gathered enough metrics, identify all your problem areas. Maybe some certain pages on your website make your visitors abandon the session, or some links are broken.
Most importantly, you need to have a clear conversion path on your website. If you are getting traffic on your website, always ensure you have a conspicuous CTA placed on every blog post.
When considering web design, a simple layout is always better. Resist the temptation to crowd your website pages with lots of graphics, menus, and links. If you want to direct a visitor to a specific page, use the black space and create a CTA that stands out on the entire page.
Final Words
If you are yet to achieve satisfactory results after kick-starting your inbound marketing campaign, answer the questions discussed in this article. When answered honestly and exhaustively, they can help you isolate the critical aspects of your marketing campaign that will keep things focused on success. Like any marketing strategy, inbound marketing requires consistent monitoring and regular modifications to maximize efficiency.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can boost your conversion rates with inbound marketing, Bespoken Management can help. We are a seasoned digital marketing agency committed to helping our clients get optimum results.
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