Building a low-cost customer acquisition engine from an early stage is critical for startups, and Inbound marketing is especially important. But that doesn’t mean Inbound marketing is easy or that everyone gets it right. To be successful, you have to understand metrics, do content marketing, focus on customer success, and do it well enough.
To help you do this, here are five easy to avoid Inbound Marketing mistakes that SaaS companies often fall into.
Content submission is too random
Content takes strategy and time to succeed, and it is important to define clear goals from the outset. Of course, the quality of your content and your message is your greatest asset. But the content should have a certain character and tone that will interact and resonate with your buyers.
Write one blog post a week, or five blog posts a week for a month or two. Take the time to create a long-term content strategy. In the case of Unbounce, its founder and CEO said their blog took six months of work from content experts before it started seeing success. You also have to clearly define what success is and how to measure it, so you know you’ve reached that stage.
Too much self-promotion and branding
Your product must be great, but use the user experience to convey that fact, and use case studies to tell customer stories. Content should be focused on prospects and customers’ needs, problems, and concerns. Keep adding value to the business conversations you want to engage in.
In a recent B2B blog post, Intercom’s John Collins pointed out that successful content marketing needs to inspire fresh and honest opinions. You can’t engage users and build content engines by just telling them about a product or feature.
Drive the transformation by trial or Demo
Free trials and demos are great and powerful, but not everyone decides to sign up the first time they visit. Be patient and use content to drive the number of conversions at the top and middle of the channel, especially for companies with high contract values or long sales cycles.
HubSpot’s blog is a good example of this. You’ll notice that at the bottom of each post, it provides clear information about the next step. After being initially translated into leads, this content remains the cornerstone of HubSpot’s marketing lifecycle strategy, as leads continue to be nurtured through the buyer’s visit process.
Put all your eggs in the organic search basket
There is no doubt that content marketing has proven to be beneficial for organic search on blogs and provides compound returns. However, it’s also important to realize that social media is becoming a growing part of Google’s search algorithm, and that effective use of distribution channels can attract thousands of visits.
Leverage the extended influence of media and opinion leaders to amplify your content success. Figure out which distribution channels offer the most business value and use opinion leader engagement strategies to get your content to a wider target audience.
Without looking at the data analysis
Remember that goal we talked about earlier? It is important to have clear strategies and targets. Not only is it important to evaluate the output, but to see what will really work. Take the time to evaluate which content provides the most value, which distribution channels are most effective, and which targets you are tracking.
Don’t let the five pitfalls above get in the way of your content marketing. Properly done, Inbound’s return on investment can be very high, reducing your customer acquisition costs. These mistakes are easy to avoid by putting your content marketing efforts in the right frame, with clear and measurable goals, and setting yourself up for success from the start. Well, you’ll be rewarded handsomely. This article is compiled from http://saascribe.com/5-saas-inbound-marketing-mistakes-to-avoid/ by Zoran @Call Technology