Creating marketing people love. It’s a great idea. A lot of traditional marketing methods work in spite of the fact that a lot of people don’t like them. People find online ads intrusive and media advertising annoying. That’s why we advocate the use of inbound and content marketing techniques. That’s why we’re HubSpot partners.
Content marketing will let you grow your business, generate sales and have your customers find you. It can let you create marketing that people love. So where do you start? For a lot of people, getting into content marketing meant signing up to HubSpot. When you sign up, you learn the system, you start creating content and measuring the results. And you see spikes all over the place. The first flush of content marketing can be really overwhelming. But then what?
If you’ve signed up to HubSpot, have you found that your traffic and leads leveled out pretty quickly? Have you hit a plateau? We’ve spoken to a lot of HubSpot users who feel the same way.
You Don’t Have The Time
Content marketing takes time, plain and simple. It’s not enough to just optimize your website once and then watch the analysis. You need to work at it. You should be constantly producing new quality content. You need to be active on social media and consistent in email marketing. You might find that marketing work just takes up time that you don’t have.
So you end up doing nothing. You signed a contract to access powerful software so you could move away from a static, brochure website. Only to create a slightly better brochure website. If you’re not putting the work in it’s no wonder the leads haven’t been flowing.
You’re Content Isn’t Good Enough
Just creating content isn’t enough. That content needs to engage your market, it needs to get people interested. All the analysis and optimization in the world won’t help you if your content simply isn’t good enough. There are a number of reasons for businesses find it difficult to create great content, like time constraints and cost issues.
The main reason is a lack of creative skill. You’re a businessperson, not a writer. Nor are your employees. Creating content that truly engages requires a certain level of skill. Without that skill, content marketing can be an uphill battle.
You Haven’t Formed a Strategy
Too many businesses apply a scattergun approach to the data they get from HubSpot. They try everything, under the assumption that a strategy will eventually develop. In most cases they end up in a constant cycle of experimentation. The data you get from HubSpot is amazing, it can help you to build winning strategy. But you need to apply a strategy.
Content marketing is open to experimentation. The more you experiment, the more interesting results you can create. Eventually, you need to define a strategy and build on it, rather than waiting for the strategy to fall into your lap.
You Have No Online Experience
Experience speaks volumes. HubSpot data can tell you about the here and now, and it can track data over time, but it can’t impart experience. If you don’t have online marketing experience, you won’t be as adept in spotting trends or finding insights in the data. A huge part of content marketing is identifying value, without experience that can be difficult to do and often leads businesses to chase metrics of little or no value.
You Believe Your Own Hype
The biggest mistake that you can make with HubSpot is to assume its data is a partner to the obvious social metrics. You look at your social media followers and assume they mean that your social activity is successful. But then HubSpot is telling you that social media is generating limited traffic and fewer leads. So you assume that it’s just a matter of time or that you need to create more posts on social media.
That may be the case, but it may be that you need to overhaul your social media presence altogether. Social media Likes alone have no value, HubSpot gives you the valuable metrics. A lot of businesses take pride in their key social metrics, but if it’s not providing value to the business that pride is misplaced.
HubSpot is a fantastic tool for creating effective content marketing. It really can make all the difference for you, if you use it correctly. If you’re not using it correctly, you might just be wasting your time, and money.
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