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3 Inbound Marketing Challenges and How to Solve Them

By March 8, 2016February 6th, 2023Uncategorized

question-622164_640.jpgAs marketers, we all face similar challenges. Proving ROI, optimizing your website, training (and retaining) a team of marketers. The difference in our problems lies in which of those challenges are harder to overcome or which challenges we choose to prioritize at any given time. Regardless of those differences, here are 3 inbound marketing challenges and how to solve them.

1)  Proving ROI

Challenge

Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing activities was the top challenge reported last year in Hubspot’s 2015 State of Inbound report. The reason why is simple, proving ROI is your key to making an argument for a budget increase. No ROI tracking, no demonstrable ROI. No ROI, no budget.

Tracking ROI is also important because it will help you understand the effectiveness of your various campaigns, emails, pieces of content, etc. It gives you feedback, which will ultimately improve your marketing process and results.

Solution

The easiest way to accomplish this task is to use software. A combination of marketing automation software and a CRM easily close the loop between both your marketing and sales efforts. You can see how many leads are generated and how many of those leads go on to be closed by sales.

Having the software gives you the opportunity to view the entire buyer’s journey that your leads undertake and can be useful in measuring the average time between lead to customer date, the average close rate, number of new leads generated, etc. All of these metrics give insight to your process and give you channels upon which you can tweak and work to improve, ultimately increasing your ROI.

2) Managing Your Website

Challenge

Your website’s performance is probably high on your list of priorities. After all, it’s an asset that works around 24/7 to draw in visitors, convert them, and help you reach your goals. Your issues with your website may vary; it could be anything from writing and optimizing content to design.

These issues usually stem from the skills and resources you have available at any given time as (depending on the size of your company) it can be hard to have all the talent in-house required to cover content, optimization, design, and overall website management.

Solution

There’s quite a few ways you can go about solving this problem, one of these ways is to hire freelancers and agency partners. You can browse Hubspot’s service marketplace for a variety of partner agencies, check out sites such as Zerys, Elance, and Contently, or leverage your personal and professional network by posting on linkedIn with a description of what you’re looking for.

3) Training Your Team

Challenge

As I stated before with website management, the talents and skillsets available in-house may not always be sufficient for your marketing team. Whether it’s training based on the various concepts of strategy, or the tools used to execute that strategy, building a marketing team fully versed in the many concepts and tools used in inbound marketing is no easy task.

Solution:

Assuming you have time on your side and aren’t in a hurry to build a team well-versed in the many aspects of inbound marketing (if you are, you may want to consider outsourcing your marketing until your team gets up to speed) you’ll want to craft out a plan. First, take the time to get an overall idea of where your team currently stands. Take a look at each individual team members’ strengths, weaknesses, levels of expertise, and commitment to your company. After all, you don’t want to invest in training someone that’ll be leaving in the next 6 months.

Then, you’ll want to check out this Ultimate Guide to Marketing Training, it’ll help you navigate all the marketing training options you have which you can use to generate a plan. Be sure to set S.M.A.R.T. goals with deadlines that you can use to measure the progress or lack of progress for each individual.

I’ve only listed a few of many potential problems your marketing team may be facing. A thorough analysis of your marketing strategy and its current performance will help you discover where your biggest marketing opportunity lies. Meanwhile, if you’re still struggling for ideas on how to prove the ROI of your marketing efforts, check out our complimentary ebook below.

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Larry Levenson

Larry is passionate about inbound marketing and is a HubSpot Certified Trainer. He's learned the "secrets" of leveraging HubSpot to make marketing hyper-effective and customizes that information to help our clients meet their goals. Larry lives in Prescott, AZ, and when not at work, he is hiking or hanging out with teenagers as a volunteer with Boys to Men USA.