Let’s start with the story of two types of businesses.
Say your business is of Type A: You have been using inbound marketing for years now. With one of the top inbound marketing platforms out there. An effective content marketing strategy, coupled with SEO, and analytics has worked for you in the past. But somehow, it doesn’t anymore.
Or your business is of Type B: You are completely new to the power of inbound. Started off with a great inbound marketing software, with proof that it should work for your business, but it hasn’t. And you don’t know why.
In both these cases, you may be getting the notion that inbound marketing has failed for you. That it doesn’t deliver results. And you do not want to engage with it anymore.
But what if we told you that in reality, you are only overdue for an inbound marketing audit?
A thorough inbound marketing assessment can give you the answers you are looking for, and also show you the way to achieve your goals using inbound!
Not sure how? Let’s take an example.
Few months into the game they found that inbound marketing was not working for them like they expected it to.
- Email open and click rates are much lower compared to industry standards
- Sales teams complained about the poor quality leads generated from campaigns
- Conversion rates have declined further
So to get a deeper understanding of the matter, they went for an inbound marketing audit.
Here are the five major problems they identified with their inbound marketing strategy.
5 Reasons Your Inbound Marketing is Failing
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Lack of Accurate Targeting
In a detailed content audit of the company, it was discovered that
- Most of their content pieces were of awareness level, targeted towards IT managers of organizations
- There was little to no content available for the consideration and decision making stages of the buyer’s journey
After a look into the inbound marketing goals of the company, and discussion with the management team, it was found that their target personas were supposed to be CIOs, CTOs and other business heads.
That’s who the sales teams pursued and that’s what the entire database consisted of.
And instead of sending them high-level decision-making content, the content team was sharing content that was all too basic for them! Or worse, completely irrelevant!
It was only natural that it would yield poor results.
So if your inbound digital marketing results are not as great as you expected, and you suspect something is amiss, it’s a good idea to revisit the targeting analysis. Conduct a detailed audit to identify if your campaigns are directed towards the right persona and whether you need to revise who your target audience is!
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Website/Content is Not Adding Value
Shortsighted Enterprises had hired a content writer to meet their content requirements. She was an expert in writing about IT topics – testing, codes, agile project management etc.
And worked really hard to keep the content engine running, doing several blogs focused on all topics far and wide, while also creating email workflows for them.
But as we discovered above, they were not directed to the right audience. So despite the huge volume of content produced, the impact it had on the business was nil.
Additionally, they didn’t have a well-thought-out SEO and intent-based approach to their website keywords, so their website wasn’t also performing well on SERP.
A proper check of your website health will help you identify where you are doing it wrong, and how you can rethink your website in order to project more strategic communication throughout your web pages.
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Ineffective Lead Generation
Not only was the website of Shortsighted Enterprises not optimized for SERP, but it was also not designed optimally to grab user attention. Their web pages had too much text, very generic images, and call-to-action buttons that didn’t follow the user journey at all.
On top of that, some of the pages were even found to be unresponsive on mobile and tablets.
If your website analytics is revealing issues like high bounce rates, low click rates, and low session duration on your web pages, it’s time to undertake a website audit of your business’ online presence.
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Sales and Marketing Misalignment
We already saw how the sales requirements for leads were completely different from what was targeted and probably delivered by the marketing team of Shortsighted Enterprises. It was obvious that they were not getting any quality leads, and hence the lower conversion rates!
Conducting an inbound marketing audit will give you a fair idea of how your sales and marketing teams are performing, whether they are aligned, and aware of the roles they need to play to achieve their business goals.
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No Tracking
Shortsighted Enterprises had set some inbound marketing goals for themselves, but it was not discussed with the team handling the execution of the campaigns. And while they had some basis of identifying that they were not performing well in terms of the leads, and email campaigns, they didn’t have any set KPIs to track their success.
So if you are unable to measure how you are performing against your goals, you probably have set the wrong KPIs for yourself. It’s time you have an analytics audit to identify the issue and set up the right metrics for your goals.
Thus conducting an inbound audit helped Shortsighted Enterprises identify the following problems in their inbound marketing process, and then explore how to correct them before moving forward.
What is an Inbound Marketing Audit?
Essentially, it is a review of your inbound marketing plan and objectives that helps you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing strategy. It can tell you which areas of your plan need improvement, and how you can optimize your resources to achieve better results.
So if you have a sense that your inbound digital marketing strategy is not working out as you hoped it would, and want to have an in-depth analysis, or need help deciding whether inbound marketing audit is for you, get in touch with us.
