Inbound Marketing: How To Overcome The 3 Biggest Challenges

Inbound marketing is deceptively difficult.

It’s not just a matter of staying active online, listing blog topics or scheduling social media posts. If you do that, you’ll only end up with pitiful web traffic and hundreds of tweets that only your business partner has liked.

The truth is inbound marketing takes time and a solid marketing strategy—not just firing content across the internet.

A Hubspot report states that 61% of inbound marketers consider generating traffic as the hardest part of their job. Yet 53% insist that they see higher ROI from inbound marketing tactics than with outbound.

Inbound marketing is undeniably a cornerstone of every business, so before you dive into it yourself, here are the three biggest inbound marketing challenges and how you can overcome them.

1. Irrelevant websites

Imagine speaking to a salesperson at a tradeshow about this unicorn SaaS that can do wonders for your revenue. You go home and search the company online to see if it lives up to the hype. But what you find is an amateurish website with vague copy and not one customer review. Never mind then.

Here’s the thing: your business website is your online reputation. Everything on it should live up to the expectations you’ve built for your prospects. The design should be easy on the eyes and the copy should be clear, concise and relevant to your target audience.

Here are a few questions to ask about your landing page or company website:

• Does the copy speak to a specific audience? You want to help your target audience feel like your service was made for them. To do this, you need to build an ideal customer profile.
• Does the copy make an emotional connection? If not, then first you need to understand your customer’s pain points. Only then will you be able to address them and offer your company as a solution.
• Does it ramble on about your company and how great the products/services are? If so, turn that copy around into how each product/service benefits the customer. Try using the ‘fact to benefit’ formula in your product descriptions.
• Does it look legitimate and trustworthy? Add customer reviews, case studies and security badges where appropriate to make prospects feel more comfortable and confident about making the buying decision.

2. No real content strategy

Hiring writers to whip up blog post after blog post isn’t going to get you very far. You need a solid content strategy to make inbound marketing actually work for you.

First, you’ll need to have your ideal customer profile. After that, you can pull keywords from their most common questions and interests to guide your content. But don’t limit yourself to just blog posts. You’ll engage with a lot more leads using infographics, eBooks, whitepapers and even webinars.

In the 2018 ‘State of Inbound’ report by Hubspot we mentioned earlier, 45% of marketers expressed their intent to add YouTube to their content distribution channels. Another study showed that including a personalised video in your social media campaigns can improve your click-through rates by 8x. Turns out that people really like watching videos.

Having a clear social media strategy is also important to keep your content flowing in the right places. Set a schedule for promoting your content (and stick with it). Quicksprout recommends circling back and promoting old posts and entire campaigns that potential leads may have missed the first time around.

To learn more, read our post on running successful B2B marketing campaigns.

3. Not enough time (or automation)

Inbound marketing is time-consuming. There are a lot of moving parts that need to work together seamlessly to make the effort worthwhile.

The good news is you can unload some of the workload onto automated marketing tools. From social media schedulers to qualified lead generation tools, there’s a dedicated platform for pretty much everything in your sales and marketing processes.

Triggr is one such tool that generates top-of-funnel prospects, gets accurate data for your marketing workflows, and finds look-alike customers for fresh prospects (which is useful for retargeting campaigns). Furthermore, Triggr integrates with a host of other platforms (like LinkedHelper and Zapier) and easily exports relevant data into your CRM and other marketing systems.

With 50% of marketers rearing to automate their marketing tactics this year, you’d better get ahead. Sign up for Triggr to get started or schedule a demo to help you decide whether it’s a good fit for your business.