10 Reasons Your Inbound Marketing Strategy is Failing Miserably

 

Creating a successful inbound marketing strategy is one of the most complex tasks and online marketer can possibly undertake. Any successful inbound marketing strategy requires marketers to embrace a range of tactics including content generation, PPC advertising, SEO, conversion rate optimization, lead generation/management and much more.

Even when you embrace all of these tactics though, an inbound marketing strategy can still fail miserably and conversions can be frustratingly scarce. More often than not, it’s seemingly small mistakes that lead to this failure by punching holes in your sales funnel (causing a leakage of potential sales and leads).We’ve rounded up ten of the most common mistakes inbound marketers make below. We urge you to avoid them at all costs.

#1 – You’ve incorrectly identified your target market (or haven’t identified them at all)

A crucial part of planning your inbound marketing strategy is to identify your target market and ideal customer. It’s important to think about who it is that you’re trying to attract and why are you trying to attract them.This process might seem quite straightforward but if you don’t do it correctly, all of your inbound marketing efforts (including content creation and PR) will fail miserably.

For example, let’s assume that you run a freelance writing business. You might assume that your target market consists of content marketing and SEO companies who are looking to outsource their content creation work to freelancers like yourselves. Seems logical, right?

However, you might find that content marketing agencies aren’t prepared to pay as much for content as you might have hoped and therefore, they aren’t really your ideal customers. In reality, you might be better targeting companies directly and ‘cutting out the middle man’, thus increasing your profits.If you were to target content marketing agencies and SEO companies, you’d likely start creating SEO related content and posting on other SEO blogs. On the other hand, if you were targeting companies directly, it would be wiser to post on business-related blogs.

You can see how important identifying your target market and ideal customer is when it comes to defining an inbound marketing strategy, so make sure you’re targeting the right people.

#2 – You haven’t clearly defined your goals

A lot of websites have multiple income streams; there’s display advertising, affiliate sales, direct sales and many other monetization strategies that contribute to a websites ‘bottom line’.While having multiple income streams is always a wise move, it can confuse things when you’re preparing an inbound marketing strategy.

Inbound marketing is predominantly all about attracting targeted website traffic; the problem is that if you don’t know what action you want that traffic to take when they actually reach your site, it’s going to be hard to convert that traffic into customers/conversions.Do you want people to buy your product, buy a product through an affiliate link or just click on your display ads? Whatever the answer is, you need to formulate your inbound marketing strategy around attracting an audience that is likely to take that particular action.

#3 – Your website is too confusing

You might be attracting hundreds and thousands of targeted leads every single day thanks to your inbound marketing efforts but if those leads don’t understand what action they’re supposed to take when they reach your site, your conversion rate is going to suffer.Remember, visitors to your website should be entering your sales funnel. If your funnel is blocked by a confusing and difficult to use website, it’s highly likely that much of the traffic you’ve worked hard for simply won’t progress to the next stage of the funnel.

There’s a lot of things that could be making your website confusing and blocking your funnel. Poor site design and a confusing navigation menu are perhaps the most common problems. If you’ve got too many buttons to click, too many ads or too many calls to action, visitors simply aren’t going to know where to click and thus, will waste no time in leaving your site without any hope of converting to a customer.Whatever you want your visitors to do (e.g. buying your product, giving you their email address etc.), you need to minimize any other distractions on your site. Make sure their attention is focused on the part(s) of your website you want their attention to be focused on and nothing else.

#4 – Your website isn’t search engine friendly

When you’re spending countless hours producing high quality content for your sites blog, embracing guest posting opportunities and embarking on other PR related activities; you want to be rewarded with an influx of targeted traffic for your efforts.Typically, as you produce more content, obtain more mentions and gain more backlinks for your site, you’ll notice that a good chunk of your traffic will start coming from the search engines (Google, Yahoo etc).

However, if your website isn’t search engine friendly, this might not be the case.Although you might have great content, it’s important to make sure that it’s formatted correctly and offers the search engines everything they need to be able to index it properly.You need to make sure you’re using H1 – H6 tags properly, linking out to reputable sources and all that good stuff (here’s a great SEO starter guide from Moz if you need some pointers).

Without a search engine friendly website, you won’t get as much targeted traffic from the search engines and thus, you could potentially be missing out on hundreds and thousands of high quality targeted leads.

#5 – Your content simply isn’t good enough

Typically, any inbound marketing strategy is highly focused on content creation; we’re talking blog posts (either for your own blog or PR/guest posting opportunities), infographics, videos, PDF’s and even whitepapers. All of these have the power to generate some serious targeted traffic when they’re done well.

The problem is that so many websites simply aren’t investing enough time, effort or money in high quality content creation. It’s likely that the vast majority of traffic to your website generated from the types of content mentioned above will be new visitors (i.e. people that have only just been introduced to your website/company through that piece of content).Now, let’s assume that the content wasn’t up to scratch (a poorly-written $3 non-native blog post, perhaps?), do you really think that visitor is likely to stick around or come back to your website? Probably not.

Do you think they’re going to trust your website/company enough to progress through the next stage of your sales funnel and perhaps even part with some of their hard-earned cash? Definitely not.Great content is the lifeblood of any well-structured and well-executed inbound marketing strategy, so make sure it gets the attention it deserves and needs.

#6 – You’re blogging about the wrong things

Blogging is a great way to generate traffic for your website but if you’re blogging about the wrong things, that traffic won’t progress to the next stage of your sales funnel and therefore, will be almost entirely worthless.Let’s assume that you’re running a men’s health/fitness website for instance. You have a blog but ultimately, you want your sites visitors to convert to a free trial of your cloud-based bodybuilding diet generator (i.e. a monthly subscription service).You might do some keyword research and find that there are high search volumes for keywords such as “how to lose weight” or “is coffee good for you”. On the face of it, these might seem like great long-tail keywords for a couple of targeted blog posts, but in reality, this might not be true.

You’ve got to think about the audience for those keywords. In this instance, it’s quite likely that more females will be searching for those topics than males. Therefore, as a men’s health/fitness website with a product aimed solely at men, this traffic is almost worthless to you.Make sure your content is as targeted as possible as doing so will increase conversion rates.

#7 – You’re not using social media properly

According to this infographic from Hubspot, roughly two-thirds of U.S. internet users regularly use a social network. From that, it’s clear that social media is a huge part of almost any successful inbound marketing strategy; the problem is that so many companies get it completely wrong.There’s more to inbound marketing on sites like Facebook and Twitter than simply sharing your blog posts every now and again. You need to be actively getting involved with and engaging your followers.

Don’t just spam people with your content; nobody likes a self-promoter. Instead, ask engaging questions and take part in the discussion. Respond to questions directly and offer great information.If you can build trust with your social media following and keep them actively engaged, they’re likely to keep coming back to your website and at some point, progress to the next stage of your sales funnel and ultimately, progress to the bottom of your funnel and convert to a customer.

There’s no problem being self-promotional on social networks from time-to-time (e.g. posting a special offer), but make sure it’s not every other tweet/update or you’ll just annoy and alienate potential leads.

#8 – You’re spending too much (and focusing too much) on PPC

PPC advertising can be a great way to get targeted traffic to your website in an instant. Unlike tactics like SEO, PPC can be set up in minutes and can bring thousands of targeted visitors within the hour quite easily.While PPC can often be a fundamental part of your inbound marketing strategy, you need to make sure that it isn’t your sole focus. You also need to make sure that you’re not spending too much money on it.

The main problem with focusing too heavily on PPC advertising that typically, it will drive your CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) up. Because you’re paying for each and every visitor, you’ll end up spending crazy money if your website isn’t extremely well optimized for conversions.It’s also worth noting that while you may be able to drive significant traffic from PPC campaigns, roughly 70% of search engine users click on organic listings. Because of this, SEO is likely to be a more cost effective solution for most companies in the long run. It’ll also bring more traffic.

#9 – Your landing page isn’t up to scratch

Landing pages are the highly optimized pages that allow you to convert regular website traffic into fully-fledged leads (or even sales). However, if your landing page isn’t to scratch, you’ll almost certainly be missing out on a ton of leads.Although your landing page might look great and be converting some of your traffic into leads, it’s almost certain that it can still be improved. If you’re not constantly testing and experimenting with your landing page(s), you’re quite literally throwing money down the drain and missing out on potential leads/sales.

You should be constantly testing different calls-to-action, headlines, layouts, color schemes and even the wording of your landing page(s). When doing this, make sure to A/B split test (or even better, perform multivariate testing) to see the effect that each change has on your conversion rate.It’s a time-consuming and tedious task but for many businesses, a conversion rate increase of just 5% – 10% can easily bring in hundreds and thousands of dollars of additional revenue per year, so it’s well worth making the effort.

#10 – You don’t have enough landing pages

If your company only utilizes one landing page for your product/service, then chances are that you’re missing out on a ton of leads and have a huge flaw in your inbound marketing strategy.

Even if you only have one product/service to sell, you will almost always benefit from utilizing multiple landing pages, as you’ll be able to better target visitors at various stages of your sales funnel.For example, a new visitor who has just been introduced to your website/company through a well-written blog post might not be ready to commit to buy just yet, but they might be happy to part with their name and email address in exchange for a free eBook.

On the other hand, a visitor who has visited your site many times and follows your social media profiles might be more inclined to convert to a paying customer.Therefore, it would be wise to show these two visitors different landing pages; one for a free eBook download and one pitching/selling your product.

Conclusion:

The key takeaway here is that no inbound marketing strategy is perfect. Sure, your strategy might not be failing miserably and you might be pulling in a good number of new leads/sales ever day, but it would be naive to believe that it can’t be improved dramatically. We suggest taking a look at every aspect of your inbound marketing strategy and checking for any mistakes mentioned above.

Check your blogging strategy, your landing page design and copy, your end goals, your social media profiles and even your website copy for mistakes and fix any problems immediately. You’re losing money if you don’t.

Come back and let us know what you changed in the comments section below. We’d love to know how it improved your overall inbound marketing strategy and conversion rate.

There are lots of questions, expert advice, and tips about Digital marketing strategies and eCommerce sales conversion optimization techniques. However, most of the tips from the writer are assumptions and ideas, not from their own experience. As a practical Digital marketing consultant, I hear the same questions from my clients and friends. Therefore, I’m going to write a few simple, easy-to-implement tips about eCommerce SEO and how to implement this to your website.

In today’s day and age, we have become dependent on modern communication gadgets & online activities. Consequently, the number of purchases from online stores is rising with each year. According to the Office of National Statistics (ONS), in 2013, 72% of adults bought goods or services online in 2013

Unlike business websites, eCommerce websites have their own set of distinctive challenges and opportunities. Companies need to take advantage of every opportunity to effectively meet these challenges. This assures a positive impact on your traffic and revenue rate. To have a gorgeous well designed and attractive website could be one part of productive sales; but are you certain that having one will increase output? If you wish to get recognized by top search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo to attract shoppers to your site, SEO is the answer. In order to improve search engine rankings, you need to ensure the website is search engine friendly.

Maximize your eCommerce Sales Conversion

SEO is an acronym for “Search Engine Optimization”. It is someone who understands how search engines work and optimizes web pages to rank highly within the search results. SEO directly plays a significant role in defining how much traffic an eCommerce store makes. Most of the online shopping sites struggle with implementing the correct SEO strategies and action plans to boost their sales conversion, and many eCommerce portals use the automated product and inventory systems that have the advantage of handling instant product page creation and sales automation through third-party applications.

However, unlike the conventional techniques that marketers use to handle web promotions (blogs, forums, etc.), for websites, optimizing online web stores is quite different. The significance of eCommerce SEO under a business plan is obvious, but on the other hand, formulating the perfect digital marketing strategies for an eCommerce website is a challenging task for business owners. Here I’m going to share the best eCommerce sales conversion optimization tips that will help you to fully optimize your online site.

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#1. Turn on Search Engine friendly URL’s

The core of every positive and effectively augmented eCommerce website is a well-versed and planned architecture. Organizing the site to make it user-friendly is truly significant. Search engines give better results when they search your website. If you have a site with many categories of products, they need to be indexed properly. Users will have an improved experience and can find what they are looking for. In search results, this helps boost a site’s visibility.

URLs make a lot of sense when they are easy to understand by humans “human-readable” and are easily understood by search engines “search engine friendly (SEF)” or pretty URL’s. Likewise, they are just as important as the description for search engine ranking and optimization and page title. URLs have a direct impact on how you rank for keywords. One of these SEO techniques is to make sure the specific keyword of interest appears in your URL. However, experts believe that having keywords in the URL is a vital share of the equation.

Best URL Rewriting Practice:

1. Consider using the product name, a category in your product page URLs
2. Avoid using too many stop words  and unnecessary special characters in your product title
3. Avoid using many .htaccess or page redirection conflict
4. Implement 301 Domain Redirection and Page, IP Canonicalization for avoiding duplicate  content issues
5. If you use Tracking parameters or session IDs, simply tell search engines to ignore this via the Google webmaster tool

 

#2. Ultimate Keyword Research Tips

Keywords are the search words and phrases that people use in their online searches. Finding the right keyword,s or you can call it the “Money Keywords”, can trigger sales. Keyword research is one of the most valuable, important, and high return activities in the eCommerce search engine optimization strategies. Using wrong or ineffective keywords can lower your site’s effectiveness drastically. For accurate research, keywords and information, you need to put in your time, using a series of relevant keywords related to the services and products is of vivacious importance. In case the keywords chosen are too common, the search results will simply not show up. And this is one of the reasons for hitting back and lower buying attributes. If your product list is the same as available on your competitor’s sites then you need to come up with quality keywords. Long-tail keyword phrases consist of three to five words that users use for explicit searches. This attracts more quality traffic, leading to more conversions.

Best keyword research & implementation strategies for eCommerce websites :

• Identify your target market and segmented audience interest via Google keyword planner or Google Trend
• Enable keyword suggestion, Ad group and traffic estimation fields to identify users monthly search volume
• Categorize high, low and average competitive keywords based on your business and product niche
• Create a list of long tail keywords, commercial keywords , generic keywords that related to your brand keywords
• Integrate keywords within your meta tags, web contents, images, and Hyperlinks, and balance your minimum keyword density
• Avoid an over-optimization issue by using a series of main commercial keywords in multiple outbound link profiles
• Generate multiple “relevant”  keywords from Google related search for your off-page link acquisition purpose
• Use long-tail keywords for image name, Alt tags, and Hyperlink title to maintain better keyword proximity

 

 #3. Craft Perfect Title for your Page

The most important SEO component on paper is the “Page Title” Tag. In order to grab online visitors’ attention and better search engine visibility, use well-planned intriguing, search engine-friendly page titles. Carefully crafted page titles always improve search engine visibility and user interaction. However, there is a standard for writing, high converting search engine friendly title tags are essential for specific product pages and static web pages.

Perfect Title tag :

• Replicating same page titles on your website is not a good idea, you need to write a unique title for each product page manually
• Keep the length no longer than 55 – 69 characters and also avoid stop words, as well as unnecessary special characters
• Brand keyword  and commercial keywords must be perfectly blended within the title tag to generate SEF title and vanity URL
• For separators, avoid underscores and instead use spaces, dashes, commas, or pipe for better search engine benefit
• Always start with brand name, product name +  product title to maintain recommended Semantic pagination structure

 

#4. Use actual Product Descriptions 

Online stores are often crowded with inventory and low on product descriptions. Writing quality and actual descriptions encourage more site traffic and provide better chances of selling. For e-commerce sites, each and every product is an opportunity to add useful content. Competitive advantages, consumer reviews, and feedback are the fruits obtained from accurately describing products, but it is essential to avoid keyword stuffing. Users’ preference and trust in your site against competitors is of vital importance. Adding SEO content and keywords for effective product descriptions are modern-day practices. It allows customers to comment on the usability of your product and thus maintains a healthy customer relationship.

How to write an Effective product description:

• Write compelling meta description blend with your main keyword and brand keyword
• Limit your meta description characters to no more than 155 characters and no less than 120 characters
• Avoid capital words, special characters, and stop words from your meta descriptions
• Try to write multiple variations and split test your title impressions, CTA using Kissmetrics or Google analytic’s
• Do not use the same meta descriptions for other pages and make sure all product pages have unique meta descriptions

 

#5.  Craft compelling, Informative Copy

Without any doubt, we are all aware that copywriting is one of the undeniably most important tasks when you talk about online business. In addition, the content needs to be distinctive to obtain better search engine rankings and convert readers as potential buyers. Therefore, you need to pay more attention to writing very informative, persuasive web content and sales copy for your eCommerce website. It is really important NOT to use the standard manufacturing product or service descriptions. Of course, copying a manufacturer’s product descriptions from other websites might save you time, but in the long run, it only generates a haphazard and the search engine will penalize your page and domain for duplicate content issues.  Avoid putting your lovely business in trouble by having a descriptive and compelling sales copy or web content for your eCommerce website and product pages, because “Content is the King”.

Simple copywriting Techniques:

• Perform in-depth research about your industry growth, product demands and identify trending product names
• Write a keyword-rich ( use long-tail keywords ) Call-to-action based magnetic headlines and subheadings
• Avoid self-promotion and biased words rather than writing users benefits and quality of your product and services
• Follow the content writing standards and craft your content exclusively for your specific product/service page
• Use the latent Semantic indexing copywriting method to manage your website resource and reference pages
• Use secondary keywords, and commercial keywords in your subheadings to rank your page well in search engines
• Add your client’s testimonials, case studies, and review links for proof to the reader about your value proposition
• Balance your commercial keywords or main keywords density and ensure it is less than 40% from your page and codes

 

#6.  Optimize Your landing page Visuals

Optimization of an image is a skill that you wish to learn. Image optimization is an imperative part of structuring a fruitful eCommerce business. 98% of eCommerce businesses always trying to display their products and services using visual explanations and video commercials. This is because people don’t have time to read an entire sales pitch and your full company history, and it’s natural for buyers to look for the best value for their investment. Therefore, you need to pay attention to optimizing your landing pages visuals such as images, videos and site architecture to deliver a better user experience to your visitors and of course to the search engines. The “Alt Tag” attributes to adding better SEO results to your online store. It achieves better rankings in search engines by correlating keywords with images. In actuality, an Alt Tag is the ideal technique to sell and popularize your eCommerce products. However, there are some advanced tweaks available for eCommerce sites.

E-commerce Landing page visual Tips: 

• Always use less weight compressed images using any online image compressor or Photoshop save for web device option
• Use a search engine friendly image name, Longtail ALT tag, better product description for image  and video caption
• Use CDN (Content Delivery Network ) or Jquery Lazy load features to make your landing page codes and  images load faster
• Create better resolution visuals and provide dimension, Angles, and right position to make your visuals are appear in the right place
• Know your right image types such as JPG, PNG, GIF and learn how to intelligently handle thumbnail images and videos
• Don’t forget to use image  and video sitemap to index your visuals via search engines to generate organic traffic
• Use OpenGraph, Twitter hCard, Google schema markup for displaying your visuals perfectly on Search engines and social media

 

#7. Hunt and Fix Broken Links, Error pages

Broken Links, pages, images and 404’s hurt SEO and affect search engines rankings. Having useless hyperlinks on sites is not just irritating; in fact, their existence may root some real impairment to your online business as well as to your reputation on the Internet. Users prefer to reach the product in the minimum quantity of clicks. Thus, it is really important to analyze and fix your eCommerce site’s Broken links, Coding errors, and browser compatibility issues to make your site compliant with search engine guidelines, as well as to provide a better user experience to your site visitors and customers. These tools can easily give a breakdown of any broken links that you might have.

Best Tools ever :

1. Broken link Checker
2. W3C Markup Validator 
3. CSS Validator
4. Google Webmaster Tool
5. Browser Compatibility Test

 

#8. Use Google Rich schema markup

User-generated content (UGC) is regularly ignored by eCommerce site owners. If organized suitably, it can have encouraging results for SEO. Statistically speaking there are many convincing factors to consider when adding User reviews on your web store. The latest and most powerful form of development in SEO is Schema Markup. The search engine result pages (SERPs) can enhance the website after active use of Schema markup. It is recorded to have a third of rich snippets and extra bits of information in Google search results.

Advantages & Statistics:

• A dramatic 4.6% increase in sales is said to take place if 50 or more reviews per product are achieved
• Sites with user reviews can attract 63% more customers to shop online
• There is a 105% probability of potential buyers purchasing who intermingle with reviews and online QA sessions
• These visitors spend 11% more than those users who do not interact with reviews
• User reviews are 12 times more trusted than the actual product descriptions marked by manufacturers
• An average of 18% uplift in sales can be gained by the single factor of “reviews”

 

Conclusion:

I’m a big fan of digital marketing and eCommerce optimization strategies! There is no doubt there are hundreds of ways to growth hack your eCommerce business website sales conversion online. However, I wrote these tips based on my experience rather than writing an idea. 🙂  Now, it’s your turn! What is the best eCommerce SEO strategy that you have implemented on your eCommerce website? Let me know your tricks in the comment box below.