When embarking on your first inbound marketing campaign, you may encounter a few bumps along the way. While minor hiccups shouldn’t damage your overall online strategy, it is important to stay away from making these three much more consequential inbound marketing mistakes.
Defining your goals should be the first step you take in any new campaign. They’ll allow you to benchmark your progress, measure how effective your campaign has been, as well as decide on the types of content you’ll be posting and the audience you plan to target. However, these goals need to be both pragmatic and attainable in order to grow your results effectively over time.
One tool that can help you to set more realistic and achievable goals is to follow the acronym ‘SMART’:
Specific: Be precise in what you want to accomplish and avoid ambiguity
Measurable: Attach tangible and quantifiable results so you’ll know when you hit the mark
Attainable: Know how far you can realistically go, and look ahead to identify potential roadblocks
Relevant: Your goals should matter to your business and align with the growth you want to achieve
Timely: Make a timeline and stick to your deadlines
A blog is a great way to post your content quickly and address the topics that are relevant to your audience. However, building a blog that’s worth paying attention to is more than just writing a bunch of words. You need to prove to your audience that you are staying up to date on their issues and focusing on the problems you can fix for them. Start by putting more planning into your content, then set a regular posting schedule and stick to it. Automation can help keep you on track.
Furthermore, optimizing your blog through keywords will allow you to kick your SEO into overdrive and help improve your web server rankings.
As your campaign proceeds and your inbound marketing efforts grow, it's critical that you are always checking in and tracking your progress. You should be reviewing your goals at least every other day. Even better, make a habit of performing a quick 10 minute review every day. By staying on top of your performance throughout the campaign, you can ensure that less than stellar results don’t prevent you from achieving your goals at the end of it. Put that data to good use by refreshing less than effective content, updating keywords and timelines, and checking that your content is being sponsored in the correct place.
As an added tip, you should be monitoring click-through rates, site visitors, call-to-action clicks, lead generation, and where your visitors are coming from (eg. blogs, video pages, sponsored content, web searches, etc.).
If you’d like help decoding what your results mean, and how you could improve them, get in touch with our SEO experts.
Before the first day, you might also consider leaving a note on your new hire.
