Why You Can't Be A Fair Weather Fan of Inbound Marketing

So I really hate to talk about it, but the Florida Gators have not been doing so hot this football season. We’ve had lots of injuries and some players getting suspended from the game, which has definitely hurt us. Regardless of how we do the previous Saturday, I still put on my orange and blue, get my coozie ready, and turn the game on my TV.  

I do this because I really think next year we’ll be a kick ass team. And because I’d be disowned from my family - hey Uncle Elwin ;). This is the kind of faith you need to have in Inbound Marketing. You can’t try it for a few months and then abandon it. You have to stick with it and hold out for that championship.

Here are a few reasons why you can’t expect immediate results:

1. Google does what it wants. And what it wants is to take its sweet time crawling the internet to index websites. Take our website; we launched our new website in August and 3 months later, Google is still reindexing our pages.

2. It takes time to master your craft. Chances are you aren’t going to be creating magnificent content on day one. It takes time to find your voice, learn what your audience cares about, and distinguish yourself from your competition.

3. A good library of content takes time to create and publish. You wouldn’t publish all your blog articles for the month in one day. That would be silly. So be patient as you publish your first set of blog articles over the initial months of your inbound marketing program.

4. It takes time for good news to spread… and by good news I mean good content. Sometimes it takes a few days or weeks for a good blog article to get traction and be shared across the vast interweb via social media, syndication sites, or email forwards. For example, my blog article on Making the Web a Better Place took a few days before it got syndicated on Yahoo! Small Business.

5. Unless you have an extremely short sales cycle, it will take time to see how your inbound marketing has helped your sales. One of the great benefits of inbound marketing is that it gives your sales team a leg up in that first section of the sales funnel. And it can also shorten your sales cycle some. But you first have to generate leads and then give your marketing time to work leads through that initial part of the funnel before it even gets to sales. For some of our clients with longer sales cycles, it could be a year from a lead’s first conversion that they actually close into a sale.  

This is where most people quit. They go back to cold calling, buying billboards and going to tradeshows (much like our friend Inbound Sally). You are wasting an opportunity.

Here are some reasons to keep your faith in Inbound Marketing:

1. It helps you create good relationships with website visitors, leads and customers.

2. It supports good user experience… which once again helps create good relationships.

3. It also supports good SEO practices.

4. It can help you get more traffic to your site through improved SEO, content getting syndicated on other sites, and people sharing your content on social media.

5. It can also help you get more leads from that added traffic because you have a reason for people to give you their contact info.

6. It can help your sales team close a lead into a customer.

7. And finally, it can turn your current customers into evangelists because you are creating and sharing content that is helpful and interesting.

Before your company starts to implement inbound marketing, make sure everyone understands that it's going to be a marathon, not a sprint. Once that is understood, start that planning!

Good luck and keep the faith!