You have adopted inbound marketing and invested everything you have into it. You are two months into posting three blogs per week. You are actively engaging on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. You have published ten different eBooks that you think are brilliant.
Then you wake up one day, and ask yourself: “How many sales have I actually closed due to my inbound marketing strategy?” Before you start to question everything you are doing and throw in the towel, take these three things into consideration on why your inbound marketing strategy may not be producing the results you are looking for.
It doesn’t happen overnight
In case we haven’t made it abundantly clear, you need to know that inbound marketing takes time; like, a lot of time. The reasons are pretty simple: Google is the most popular search engine on Earth (still), which means we have to cater our style and posting to Google’s desires. The search giant uses a web crawler to “crawl” every website, adding it to Google’s massive index. As soon as your site is in the index, it can begin showing up in search results – but you don’t get to decide when Google actually crawls the site. Additionally, every new page needs to be crawled individually in order to show up in search results. So if you’re starting a business site from scratch, it’s going to take a long time for you to develop a sizeable online footprint.
Your content plays a critical role
Aside from producing content regularly, you need to do so in dependable fashion. For instance, select at least three weekdays to post new content and ensure you have a new blog article on each of those days. We recommend blogging daily for maximum effectiveness, but three times a week is a solid start.
But the content can’t just be about anything – the topics need to be relevant to your customer base. You see, customers will “Google” their problems and concerns directly; therefore, if your blog articles are covering these subjects, you’re very likely to get some hits. However, it also raises the importance of selecting good topics. Because if your topics aren’t relevant to your customers, they’re never going to come across your site.
Don’t forget to promote, promote, promote
Yes, I wrote it three times because it’s that important. Google is going to do the heavy lifting in terms of search results and driving traffic, but you can certainly help that process along. You should post links to every new piece of content on all of your company social media accounts. Not only will this help you drive traffic, it will also boost your social media following. You need to stay active on these sites in order to grow your following, because in 2015, customers don’t just want to connect via social media with their favorite companies – they flat-out expect it.
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