Marketing managers the world over, rejoice: Whatever you might be hearing, you do not have an inbound marketing problem.
Don’t get me wrong, I love inbound marketing. I’ve been implementing inbound solutions for years. I just went to INBOUND 2014 in Boston, where I was so drenched in the Kool-Aid that I’m now a suspicious shade of orange…or that could just be my latest dodgy spray tan.
Regardless of all that, marketing managers do NOT need another problem. You have enough to contend with, particularly in this digital age where the buyer—not the vendor—is in control, where recent research from Google and CEB suggests customers are nearly 60 percent on their way toward making a purchase decision before they even think of speaking with a sales rep.
Marketing these days is complicated. Gone is the era of “Mad Men”, when you could make a lovely print or TV ad touting the product’s fabulous features, and people would line up to buy it. Now marketing campaigns are multi-faceted beasts, with thousands of different moving parts—landing pages, website content, email, social media, paid search, organic search, video, mobile…the list is ever-growing.
Let’s break down a few of the problems today’s marketing managers do have:
- Lead generation and the somewhat fraught relationship between marketing and sales
- Tighter budgets and fewer resources.
- Multiple different systems to execute different campaign elements—call them Franken-systems if you will, but trying to execute a modern campaign with a hodge podge of systems means that you spend all your time holding the pieces together and let's forget about a holistic measurement of the campaign.
- Keeping up with content production, including content in a variety of different formats, from blogs to eBooks, webinars, video, white papers and case studies.
- Putting a promotional strategy together whether it’s paid search, social media, PR, blogger outreach or syndicated content.
- Measurement and analytics - knowing what to measures, and actually being able to nail down the data is tough. Google Analytics is awesome, but sometimes it's just too much data and not enough answers.
So why, again, is there no inbound marketing problem? Because there doesn’t need to be. Don’t fall into the trap of believing you need to throw out everything you've learned about marketing and switch to this new "inbound marketing". Instead, use it strategically to solve problems, not create them, while also still maintaining the outbound tactics that work for you.... even if that does mean the occasional trade show.
For instance;
- If your CFO has tightened the belt on your marketing budget, inbound marketing can be a cost-effective approach. Studies have shown the cost per lead is lower with inbound tactics.
- If you need to show ROI, inbound can help you measure the results from content marketing efforts to separate the successes from the duds. This not only makes your efforts more efficient, it helps to speak the same (financial) language and have hard data to show to the people who are allocating budgets.
- Leverage your sales team. Pick their brains. What are their prospects telling them? Where are the sticking points in the sales cycle? Show them you value their opinion—which you should—and create content that they can use in the sales process and voila! Marketing-sales tension solved (well, maybe improved…)
If your marketing efforts result in a lot of disjointed, expensive and hard to measure campaigns, then you do have a problem. By contrast, if the campaigns you want to execute are content led, customer-centric, lean budget and must be measurable, inbound can actually make your life easier.
What do you think? Worth a shot? Any other problems I missed?
