If you’re new to the inbound marketing game, it’s easy to drink the Kool-Aid and run into battle without a strong game plan. One of the benefits of inbound marketing is that it’s relatively easy and low-cost – but if you don’t know what you’re doing (yet), it’s a good idea to slow down and make sure you’re being strategic about your plan.
Here are four of the biggest mistakes you may encounter once you decide to embark on a serious inbound marketing campaign:
1. Trying to do everything at once
There’s an old joke in the business world: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. It can be tempting, once you commit to pursuing inbound marketing, to start feverishly generating content on every platform – blogging, social media, email marketing. But it’s a good idea to start small and work your way up to full speed – trying to do it all at once can quickly become overwhelming. There’s a reason people make this their full-time line of work – it takes a lot of time and energy to do it right, and doing it wrong will cost you both time and money. Without a strategic plan, it’s fairly easy to generate large amounts of meaningless content that may not even help you reach your goals – and that may, in fact, damage your brand.
Instead, start with a strong strategy and build gradually, over a period of several months. Prioritize, and start with the platform that will have the strongest ROI for your business. Do you have anything to promote in a weekly newsletter, or do you need to build up your article database first? Is your website set up to convert, so that once you draw potential customers in with articles, you can steer them into your sales funnel? Be strategic. Make a plan. Stick to it, no matter how tempting it is to start dabbling in everything at once.
2. Not setting SMART goals
Goals are like the roadmap for your strategy. Once you have specific goals, you can turn them into concrete tasks – and once you have concrete tasks, you can track your progress and your success. Make sure your goals are SMART:
- Specific: Be detailed in your plan. “Increase engagement on social media” is a great goal – but it’s vague. “Post twice a day on each social platform and get at least 5 comments per post” is a better one. Without being specific, it’s hard to understand what you’re really trying to accomplish.
- Measurable: Make sure there’s a way you can actually measure whether your efforts are bearing fruit. If you can’t figure out some way to measure your ROI, you have probably set a goal that isn’t going to succeed.
- Attainable: Be honest with yourself about what you can accomplish – at least right now. It’s great to say you want to get 1,000,000 people on your mailing list, but if you’re starting from scratch, it might be better to sign up 1,000 people and see what’s working to get you to the bigger goal.
- Relevant: Does each goal actually matter to your overall strategy? Will it have an impact? Cut out the fluff and stick to ideas that will get you where you actually want to be.
- Timely: Do all of your goals make sense right now? Can you achieve them at this point in the game? Again, be honest with yourself. If you need to wait until later with some of your ideas, that’s okay.
3. Discarding what you already have
You probably already have some sort of marketing plan in place – take a good hard look at what you’re doing and what already works. There’s no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Maybe a few minor revisions are all that’s needed for your current marketing materials to work for inbound marketing – or maybe they’re fine as-is, and you have a good base to build from already in place. Audit your website, your social pages, your print materials and your direct mail collateral. Look at ways you can repurpose what you’ve already invested in.
4. Not blogging
End of day, there’s almost nothing you can do that will pack a bigger punch than blogging. A strong blog fuels your social posting and your email marketing efforts, not to mention improving your search ranking. So don’t put off until tomorrow what you absolutely should be doing today. Make sure your posts are informative and well-written, that they are relevant to your audience and that they have strong calls-to-action. You should always be driving people into your funnel – whether it’s through your copywriting or through strategically placed banners on your pages. So put on your blogging hat, and start writing.