With the right tools and techniques, inbound marketing can be incredibly lucrative for almost any business. You can consistently generate traffic to your website, expand your reach to new audiences, and even boost sales and revenue.
But inbound marketing is far from a get-rich-quick scheme. If you’re going to be effective in this area, you need to overcome the challenges and obstacles that hold most people back.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a set of strategies designed to naturally attract people to your brand. It’s often contrasted with outbound marketing, which relies on outreach to spread your message to new people. An outbound strategy might be advertising on a highway billboard, while an inbound strategy might be something like writing a free eBook designed to get people to sign up for your email list.
Inbound marketing isn’t perfect. Building up an inbound marketing strategy usually takes a long time, and you’ll have less control over who you reach with this method. Still, inbound marketing is praised for its incredible cost efficiency, high scalability, and practically unlimited potential.
The Biggest Challenges to Overcome
So what are the biggest challenges you must overcome in your inbound marketing strategy?
1. Developing a clear strategy.
The basics of inbound marketing are relatively easy to understand. You want to make your brand attractive and more visible, so it naturally encourages more people to visit and engage. But how exactly do you do that? With so many potential channels to explore and so many options in terms of messaging, it’s hard to nail down a high-level architecture that you can follow through all of your low-level tactics. You’ll need to sort this out if you want to be effective.
2. Understanding your audience.
Market research can help you identify your target audience, but you’ll need to truly understand that audience if you want to market to them effectively. For example, you might know that you want to target young professionals in the middle stages of their careers, but what types of content do those people really want to read? Targeted surveys can help you figure this out if you’re asking the right questions, and measuring the performance of your brand assets can help you fine-tune your strategy from there.
3. Early budgeting.
In the later stages of your inbound marketing development, you’ll make plenty of revenue to reinvest into future inbound marketing efforts. But in the early days, if you have a limited marketing budget, it may be difficult to do everything you want to do. You can address this by focusing on free, inexpensive channels like email and social media.
4. Unifying your voice across channels.
Inbound marketing typically relies on many different channels and strategies following the same strategy and goals. If you have many different people working on these messages, how do you unify your voice across channels? Consistent documentation and brand standards can help enormously here.
5. Converting optimally.
You might generate hundreds of thousands, or even millions of users to your website. But what do you do from there? If you don’t have a way to convert those visitors consistently and reliably, your traffic will be wasted. That’s why it’s crucial to practice conversion optimization in conjunction with all your inbound marketing strategies. Boosting your conversion rate by even one percent can massively increase the revenue potential of the traffic you’ve already earned.
6. Outcompeting your rivals.
One of the downsides of inbound marketing is that it’s so effective that millions of brands are actively participating. Chances are, you already have rivals and competitors who have been developing inbound marketing assets for years. How do you even start to challenge them? Outspending them is one option, but targeting a different niche or surpassing them in terms of quality is usually more effective.
7. Tracking and analyzing data.
Data analytics is critical to keep your inbound marketing efforts objective. Installing and using the right reporting tools can make this much easier.
8. Keeping up with trends.
Inbound marketing is always evolving, as are the technologies that enable it. If you fall behind on the latest trends, your competitors may quickly eclipse you. Staying up-to-date on the latest news and community discourse is all you need.
Pursuing inbound marketing is always going to be a learning experience. Your inbound marketing approach is never going to be perfect, and there will always be new things to learn. As long as you’re aware of the challenges you face, and as long as you’re willing to keep working through the tough spots, you’ll eventually polish an inbound marketing approach that’s capable of taking your business to new heights.
Featured Image Credit: Unsplash; Thank you!
