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Do you have problems with the inbound? Do you hire inbound marketing services and do not finish to get the juice? Do not you know if it's right for your business?
In this post I bring you a summary of the main problems you may encounter when using inbound marketing to identify and avoid them. As always, I speak of inbound itself, isolating it from the "other marketing". This confusion is already a very serious problem in itself, because many professionals do not differentiate them, which leads them to make mistakes.
That inbound marketing works already we all know; That is why more and more agencies and companies are joining in to implement this methodology in their strategy. The demand for professionals in the specialized inbound sector also grows exponentially. But this powerful methodology must be applied correctly and that is what very few get. I hope and wish you to do it.
First the philosophy, then the methodology
The first thing is to understand the philosophy behind the inbound, and this necessarily requires a change of mentality. It seems easy, but it is not so easy, because the most complex variable in any organization is people. If we start doing inbound marketing and we do not have its philosophy integrated, we are already starting badly and we will hardly succeed; hopefully we'll get some crumbs.
Not correctly integrating the inbound philosophy is the most widespread error; technical skills are easy to learn, implement and systematize, but changing the way of thinking is not so much.
Ask yourself if all the members of your team are perfectly aligned with the inbound, especially with the customer culture. In most cases the agencies are converted to the inbound or end up offering other marketing products such as PPC, SEO, web development ... In this case the inbound should be a separate department with specialized staff and not usually. You can read this post where I talk about the different types of inbound agencies.
If you want to do inbound seriously, self-audit: do an audit to your company or department, identify which are the keys of the inbound and burn them on your computer. Make them part of your team's culture or, better yet, make the inbound the culture itself.
To understand the inbound philosophy, we have to differentiate what is inbound and what is not. I identify the following as keys and distinguishing elements of other traditional marketing practices :
The Inbound Methodology
Once this philosophy is understood, we can implement the method. It makes sense, right? I repeat: if you have done the first step well, you have a lot of livestock. Sometimes, the simplest things are the most difficult to carry out.
There are many marketing professionals who are very good technically, and you will not have much trouble assembling the pieces so that your inbound machinery goes like a rocket if you successfully implement the inbound culture in your team.
However, not everything is a path of roses: in the application of the methodology problems arise; According to our experience, we have identified the most common. Make sure that the agency you hire pays special attention to the following points:
1. Customer centricity
We all know what a target is, but a buyer person is much more than that. The buyer person is the definitive engineering of customer-focused marketing. By building a buyer the right person we will have a deep knowledge of our client in all possible areas. So and only then we can adapt to your needs and solve your problems.
This is the first step of the methodology; There are thousands of articles on the internet that talk about this topic, but it still fails. Do not skimp on time or resources to define the profile of buyer person with the greatest depth and detail possible.
Think that the more details you know about your buyer, the more likely you are to get close to them and buy them. Check your or your buyer person every so often.
I repeat: do not spare time or resources, because every nuance you can find multiplies your chances of success.
Related: Why the Customer's Life Cycle so Important
2. Buyer's journey.
One of the wonders of the inbound method is to segment the stadiums that our buyer goes through since he is an unknown until he becomes a client, which gives us the ability to offer tailored content according to the needs and motivations of our client. potential in each moment.
If we have incorrectly built the buyer person, we will identify our buyer's stadiums in the wrong way too. That is why it is so important to be very safe in the first steps of our strategy: they are the first bricks of our construction and they have to be well placed to support the rest of the structure.
3. Content creation and lead nurturing.
In inbound marketing we generate content based on our buyer's people and their buyer's journey. If we have taken the wrong steps, we will be wasting an enormous amount of resources in the form of working hours, use of design tools, hours of content strategy, meetings ... And then we will ask ourselves what happened.
Once the appropriate content has been created for the buyer and its different stadiums, we can implement lead nurturing actions, offering valuable content to these leads through automated systems.
4. Marketing alignment with sales.
Following the inbound philosophy, the sales process also changes. A differentiating feature of the inbound methodology is that the marketing and sales departments work together sharing dashboard and vision regarding the KPIs and the progress in the objectives.
Like any salesperson, the inbound sales representative will always work to achieve the objectives, but the inbound sales team will do so thinking about the real customer, exercising non-intrusive practices and doing what I call consultative or advised sales. The inbound vendor becomes a consultant and not a shark.
This is another big error very widespread among the professionals of the inbound, and why is it? You will find the answer in the first point: the reality is that they do not do inbound, they have not integrated the philosophy and they are not inbound when they rush anxiously to close the sale even if the client is not ready. At this point, all the work done to attract a stranger is completely destroyed: the bad effect caused in your potential client has a difficult solution, because it will reject you and will stop trusting you.
Always remember that the inbound is not intrusive: it is active in the nutrition of leads and makes consultative, non-aggressive sales.
5. Long-term approach.
If you need immediate or short-term results, inbound marketing is not your thing. Another great cause of desertion of the inbound method is that many companies are attracted by the benefits and benefits that endorse this methodology, but the results come in the medium or long term.
For this reason, most of the agencies that offer this service only accept annual projects or, in some cases, if the client is new inbound and for this to verify the progress, they accept contracts of six months extendable to one year.
Related: 5 Tips to Make Brands Get the Most out of Micro-Moments
Companies that approach inbound marketing can have two problems:
Lack of resources: Lack of investment to hire and maintain a long-term inbound marketing plan because of the need for results.
Lack of vision: Some companies have resources, but the person in charge of marketing does not see or integrate the inbound in their general marketing plan or objectives, and continues with PPC, social media campaigns, etc.
I hope this post will help you better understand the inbound method, correct your mistakes and achieve the desired objectives.