We decided to write this piece on inbound marketing mistakes because this week, we acquired our first customer from inbound marketing.
Along the way, we had multiple leads that mentioned content marketing as contributing to their decision of working with us, but vague.
This time, this client went through the whole process of inbound lead generation. First, he discovered us on LinkedIn. Then, he saw one of our articles posted in a Facebook group. Afterward, he searched us on Google and visited our website. He read a couple of our articles on the blog, returned to the website, and sent an email requesting an intro call with us.
Flawless flow!
While I was extremely happy and grateful for this small success, I couldn’t help thinking how long it took to acquire a customer from content marketing.
But the truth is, we made these 2 inbound marketing mistakes that we always advise our clients not to do. And we’ll advise you too so that you can be smarter than us.
Not giving it enough time – top inbound marketing mistake
I remember that after 6-8 months of constantly writing on our blog and barely seeing some poor leads from our content, I said to myself: maybe it’s not the right strategy, maybe we don’t have the time to put enough work into it (which, indeed, we didn’t), maybe it’s not how we sale and we should focus more on direct sales.
And while all these things might have applied, the truth is that it was too early. It took us 3 years until we could attribute the first client to inbound marketing. 3 years.
It’s true, the first year, we barely communicated, and then we put everything on hold because we lacked (didn’t prioritize) resources.
But still… We didn’t wait for the results. We didn’t evaluate our work the way we do it with our clients.
Because when it’s about your business, when it’s about your product, it gets personal, you get emotional, and you expect things to happen differently because it’s you in the game. And you, like all of us, think you’re special and that’s why the strategy doesn’t work for you. But the truth is this is one of the most common inbound marketing mistakes even professional marketers do.
Not being consistent with inbound content
For us, it’s still a challenge to be consistent with writing on the blog, with sending these newsletters, with working on some great case studies that we’ve been planning on creating for a year now.
And I can’t stop thinking: how many customers could we have acquired if we didn’t put everything on hold for almost a year? How many people would know about the work we do, the great results we have on content marketing with our clients, how many products we’ve marketed, and so on? If… we wouldn’t make this critical inbound marketing mistake of not being consistent.
So, if there’s one thing you should always do is be consistent with your inbound marketing. Do less, but do it constantly. Don’t strive to make it perfect, but do it constantly.
Because consistency and patience are key.
Hope this week’s insight helped!
Gabriela