While most CEOs understand the strategic need for building a business plan, they fail to understand the importance of a marketing plan which is just as vital. The objective of a marketing plan is to win and keep customers by creating a successful marketing campaign.
A good digital marketing campaign will define channels and tactics an organization will leverage to attain desired goals. It is a detailed list of activities to be concluded within a defined time frame, the product, the buyer persona, and the strategies to sell.
Even large organizations have done strategic blunders while executing a campaign, these errors mean a waste of time, effort, and resources.
Although it is very rare to see an inbound marketing plan without the slightest of errors, learning about the most detrimental ones is important in order to avoid them harming your business.
It is even more important for the first-timers to understand the concepts of inbound marketing before getting your hands dirty.
5 Things to look out for before creating your Marketing Campaign
1. Inadequate Understanding of Buyer Persona
Before starting your inbound marketing journey, you need to know who your target buyer is. A good persona keeps you from shooting into the dark, and make you hit the target you are aiming for.
For this you need to ask yourself some basic questions:
- Who your current customers are?
- How did they find you?
- Why did they choose you?
- What other companies did they look at during evaluation?
This information will be very helpful in classifying your buyer personas and helping you to reach more of them.
Understanding who your target prospect is just part of the battle, you must also identify what you want them to do. What’s the goal you want the end-user to reach? Like a Sign up for a free trial, a demo, or possibly request a consultation?
Once all these questions are answered, you should now have a clear idea about your target buyer persona and what you want from them.
From here, you can build your inbound marketing strategy around how and where you can reach out to them.
2. Misaligned Content Strategy
There is a logical reason for the proverb ‘Content is King’ and why 88% of B2B marketers use content marketing in their marketing campaign strategy.
Most marketers think that quantity and frequency alone will bring them results; but if you don’t have a marketing strategy in place, your content will fail.
There must be a well-planned strategy for the content to work for your inbound marketing, and it must be driven by specific goals intended to address the concerns of your target audience.
If you supposedly wish to increase the number of ‘Free Trial’ sign-ups for your product on your website, you will first have to find your buyer persona and then start aiming them with information in the form of content, like a blog post, that they would be attracted to.
This targeting should be designed to lead your audience to a blog post through Facebook ads, LinkedIn posts, or email marketing.
Once they are on the blog and like what they get they may indicate interest by commenting on your post, subscribing to your blog, or even filling out a form for an offer on your website.
This gives you the chance to continue to build this relationship; turning initial interest into a lead or association that over time can be tactically nurtured into a marketing qualified lead or even a customer.
3. Dropping Quality to Increase Quantity
Producing content regularly and constantly is crucial to the success of any inbound marketing campaign. In a study conducted by HubSpot, it was found that companies publishing four blog posts per week get 3.5 times more traffic than those who post up to four blog posts a month.
But it’s important to note that for getting these results, the blog posts must contain quality content.
In the initial stages of building a marketing campaign, a lot of businesses tend to focus on being able to release as much material as they can without really taking the time to check the quality of the content, they are publishing.
All content can be categorized into any of the 3 major categories: entertainment, education, and problem-solving. These are the major kinds of content that people search for. If your content does not fall into any of these categories, you’ll start losing readers, leads, and customers despite increasing the number of blog posts published.
It is notably important that your reader must find your content entertaining, interesting, and, above all, helpful, and it is to be made sure that it is posted consistently. You can speedily accomplish this by using an editorial calendar.
4. Missing out on Monitoring
You should never underestimate the power of analytics; you must not miss out on this for a strong inbound marketing plan.
It would be difficult for you to find historical data as you are starting afresh, but still, there is a way out.
Data on how your inbound marketing campaign is progressing is fed daily, some marketers don’t review these until the campaign is over. But for you, this is the opportunity to realign your campaign daily and finally reach the desired goals.
First off, you’ll determine what metrics should you be monitoring based on your inbound marketing plan. For instance, if you have created an inbound marketing campaign to generate leads from the US, then you need to keep a close eye on the blog post views, click through rates, number of leads generated, traffic sources, and demographics of your website’s traffic.
Even if the click through rate is high and you are able to generate some leads, and if most of those leads are from any other geography, you’ll need to make some adjustments to your marketing campaign to make sure that your leads come from the right country.
5. Starting everything at once
The most common mistake startup companies make, after reading about the success stories using inbound marketing, is that they want to do everything at once.
Starting with blog posts, email marketing, Social media, they end up spreading themselves too thin that monitoring and evaluation become tedious and overwhelming.
This is where having a well-defined buyer persona helps. It makes it easy to pinpoint which type of content will be most appealing to your prospects, and which inbound marketing channel you should prioritize and focus on.
It is also important to keep a close eye on your data in order to see which inbound marketing channels are performing and which ones are not producing that much results so you can make the required modifications.
Your first Marketing Campaign must align with your brand story. It should deliver content and marketing messages in a form that showcase the essence of your brand.
You should always focus on providing value to your prospects at each stage of the life cycle. It is crucial to first build trust with your audience which helps create authority for your brand and get loyal followers and customers.
Clarity of using channels of communication is most important to avoid any kind of marketing mistake. The same thought process must be communicated well to the other team members who are associated with your marketing campaign.
When each member of the team is on the same page, it will be much easier to achieve your overall goals and objectives.
