6 Reasons Your Inbound Marketing Campaign Will Fail

Inbound marketing campaigns are highly complex, and require many moving parts that rely on each other to accomplish the overarching goal. It’s easy for those moving parts to get lost in translation—here’s how to avoid that.

When you’re planning a highly involved inbound marketing campaign, it’s easy for steps to slip through the cracks. Between client and internal communication - and relying on other team members to complete tasks while meeting strict deadlines – there’s a lot going on.

Here are 6 easy mistakes to make, and why you need to avoid them next time you create a blueprint for an inbound marketing campaign.

1. You’re Not Utilizing Buyer Personas

Every company needs to understand its  current customer (and prospective  customer). Determining your buyer personas will help you understand customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. 

It takes work to develop personas by conducting surveys, interviews, and so on. Without this information, it’s difficult to attract, sell to, and delight your current and potential customers.

2. Your Content is Crap

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Content is the cornerstone of any successful inbound campaign. It should cater to a specific persona and address a specific pain point that the persona is facing.

Because content fuels  the inbound journey, it  should have a clear purpose. Writing content for the sake of content will only derail your buyer journey and  confuse your core personas. Learn more about why content must be a priority here.

 3. Your Strategy Sucks

A major reason why marketers'  inbound campaigns fail is because  they  try to implement a “quick-fix” strategy. This never works because you can  easily  miss  several major components of a successful campaign.

Inbound isn’t about creating a ton of content, publishing it, and hoping for the best—it’s about targeting a specific audience, tailoring content to that audiences' pain-point, and then creating  a nurturing workflow to ensure the potential customer stays within in the buyer’s journey.


Download your free inbound marketing campaign template here! 


4. Your Sales and Marketing Are Not Aligned

Inbound marketing brings in leads—leads that are qualified and ready to hear about your product or service. If you don’t invite your sales team to the table, then you’re losing a lot of potential revenue. Sales and marketing have traditionally been two separate departments, but the inbound methodology strives to bring those departments together.

It’s the responsibility of the marketing team to pass qualified leads to the sales team as they go through the buyer’s journey. Expecting the sales team to do all of the work is a thing of the past.

5. Your Offer is Not Valuable

All inbound marketing campaigns lead up to some sort of bottom-funnel offer (e.g., free consultation, assessment, or estimate). This  asset should provide an answer to the key problem that has led the user  to your site.

As your customer makes their way through the funnel, they expect that the end result is what will solve this problem. If your deliverable doesn’t meet this expectation, your campaign will fail.

6. You Neglect the Reporting Stage

It is critically important to pay attention to the metrics of your inbound campaign. How can you expect to improve if you don’t analyze marketing performance?

These metrics show you what your prospects are responding to, and the content that is most important. These valuable insights can inform future strategies or even expand your current strategy with more content or additional offers.

Do You Have What It Takes?

In order for any inbound marketing campaign to be considered successful, you must be willing to invest the time and resources that  support the assets that make up a profitable campaign. Without proper planning, a campaign will almost never succeed. Covering all the bases before your team’s work for the campaign begins will ensure you’re set up for success.