As a business owner or manager, it's your job to ensure you have a successful inbound marketing strategy in place and that your inbound marketing ROI is where it needs to be, if not better.  In order to plan a successful inbound marketing campaign, you'll need to be aware of the most common inbound marketing newbie mistakes. Once you are familiar with the most common inbound marketing mistakes, you will be better able to lead your team to success. 

The Top 5 Mistakes Of Inbound Marketing Newbies

1.  Not Identifying a Buyer Persona

Before doing anything else, you need to identify your buyer persona.  That means creating a profile of your best customer.  Not just demographics and job title, but beyond that -- their most common questions, their biggest problems, the places they hang out online, who they report to, their lifestyle, etc.  

The best way to do that is through thorough research.  You can start by interviewing some of your best customers and asking them questions like:

• What problems does our product help you solve?
• How did you learn about us?
• Describe a typical day at work.  What "fires" do you have to put out on a regular basis?
• What social networks do you most commonly use?
• Are there any sites online that you frequently visit?

Another great source of information about your target persona is your sales team.  They are the ones who field most questions and do the most interaction with potential customers, and it will be critical that they share what they know about your customers with you.

Why should you do all this? Because you want your online content to be relevant to customers and potential customers.  The goal is to create content that's interesting to them, not to just talk about your company and products or services.

2.  Not Having an Editorial Calendar

An editorial calendar is an absolute must if you want to launch and track all your inbound marketing campaigns effectively.  OK, but what exactly does an editorial calendar do?  An editorial calendar will help you organize, plan and publish all your various types of content.  It will organize the who, what, where, when and why for each piece of content you distribute.

• Who is responsible for creating each piece of content?
• What type of content should be produced and published?
• Where will all of the content be published?
• When will each specific piece of content be published?
• Why should this content be published?  What is its purpose?
• How will this content be promoted once it's published?

Using an editorial calendar is more than just dates, times and deadlines.  Imagine trying to market and track your wide variety of inbound marketing campaigns without knowing exactly what went where, when and why and the measure of results for each one.  Your editorial calendar will solidify your entire content strategy through the efficient use of goals, collaboration and through more efficient and effective publishing.

3.  No Calls to Action

No inbound marketing campaign should ever leave your hands without including a strong call to action.  Period!  You spent all that time and money having professional content written and designed - now you need to lead the customer into doing exactly what it is you want them to do.  The only way to do that is with an attention grabbing call to action.  If you are using a call to action, but aren't seeing the results you expected, then your call to action isn't strong enough and you need to change it. 

Which of one of the following do you think is better:

"Click Here To Learn The Top Five Things You Must Never Do If _____"

or

"Click Here To Learn More About _______"

Which one would you click?

4.  Boring Content

With access to the internet, we all get news and information lightning fast.  When posting a new piece of content, you need to put a different spin on things by giving your content a different perspective.  If your content revolves around giving people yesterday's news, they will quickly click out of your site and move on to someone else's - someone who is giving them something new and exciting.  Something they didn't already know. 

5.  Posting Inconsistently

Your content production and the rate at which you post that content must be consistent.  This is where your inbound marketing editorial calendar comes in.  Utilize your calendar to keep all your content scheduling and posting consistent throughout all your campaigns. 

You can't just submit one post to one site this week then forget about it until next month. Quality content and consistent posting is what will help you maintain a high ranking in the search engines.  Higher rankings mean higher inbound marketing ROI by obtaining more customers and it also means your current customers will be able to find you when they need you.