In college, I was tested on the four P’s of marketing. My professor wanted me to remember product, place, promotion, and price, as they were all essential things to remember if you wanted a marketing degree. Despite my recent graduation from college, these four p’s are becoming outdated, as they don’t account for the digital space that makes up inbound marketing and marketing automation.
In order to be successful in inbound marketing, you need to be confident that your patience and perseverance will pay off after a few months. Additionally, marketers need to have balanced planning for both short-term and long-term successes. Lastly, inbound marketers need to understand and realize the importance of SEO and Google’s Penguin and Panda search algorithms.
Patience, Young Grasshopper
Rome wasn’t built in a day. My apologies for the cliché but the same goes for your inbound marketing campaign. Inbound marketers are regularly blogging, scheduling social media posts, sending emails, and much more to attract people to your website. Unfortunately, there is no set number of blogs that you need to publish to create an efficient and sustainable inbound marketing engine. Rather, the continuous completion of inbound-related tasks snowballs into a high-ranking on Google, increased customer engagement, and increased revenue.
Being patient towards your inbound doesn’t translate into being complacent. As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, inbound marketers are only successful through a repetitive cycle of content creation, campaign development, and campaign execution. For example, the lifecycle of a blog isn’t over after the first month. Studies show that approximately 30% of blog impressions will be after the first month.
I Think I Can, I Think I Can…
At first glance, you might think patience and perseverance are the same things for inbound marketing. However, they represent different mindsets. Patience is referring to the strategy of inbound as a whole. Perseverance involves taking the right steps to adapt and change when needed. Just like any job, if it’s broken, it’s up to you to figure out how to fix it. If you aren’t getting leads from your website, it’s the inbound marketer’s responsibility to find out why, and make the right changes to hit your goals moving forward.
“Plans Are Nothing. Planning Is Everything”
This quote from President Dwight Eisenhower is a perfect example of the importance of being assertive in planning for inbound marketing. We read success stories for inbound showcasing impressive statistics like increased leads by 7.5 times, but we forget all the effort that was undergone to generate those results. These results almost always are the end product of a strategic and well-thought-out planning process.
The details of your inbound planning shouldn’t be a priority until you formulate the overall strategy, which should include these major aspects:
- Attract visitors to your website
- Convert website visitors into leads
- Nurture those leads until they are ready to close
- Delight customers
Once you decide how you’ll attract, convert, nurture, and close, you can start planning the minutia of your inbound strategy. Need help getting that started? Check out this helpful blog post for a checklist of items you should run to make sure you don’t miss anything.
Penguin
As one of Google’s search algorithms, Penguin ranks websites based on the quality of their links. A link on your site is like a vote for it. With more links, or, in this case, the more votes, Google will rank one website higher than the other. However, if one site abuses the power of links they will be penalized with a reduced Google ranking.
Penguin knows which links are real and organic, and which ones are redundant or unhelpful. Using unfair links is one black hat SEO technique that Google is cracking down on with Penguin.
Panda
Another search algorithm, Panda, ranks based upon website content. Google’s intention behind this algorithm is to ensure that websites have a library of high-quality, non-duplicate content. Some websites were creating a multitude of subpages with one or two sentences of duplicated content, and since Panda’s release, those sites have suffered a drop in search engine ranking.
When creating content for your website, it’s essential that you don’t simply copy and paste. Take the time to be helpful for your visitors. Put yourself in their position and try to answer their questions. If you do so, you won’t be penalized by Google’s periodical updates to Penguin and Panda.
Digital marketing is an effective marketing strategy when used correctly. In my experience, people without patience or perseverance in their inbound strategy will be too worried about creating short-term success instead of a sustainable company. Those without a plan or a way to achieve your desired results are doomed to fail. Furthermore, since Google dominates the online search world, it is imperative that you learn about the Panda and Penguin search algorithms.
At Revenue River, we take the time to piece together an effective inbound marketing strategy and work with you to drive the results that you’re looking for. Looking for more SEO tips and tricks? Check out our International SEO Checklist!