Inbound marketing is supposed to be the easiest part of internet marketing, but you would be surprised how often people screw it up. These screw ups are important because they mess with inbound marketing success metrics and can lead to people not understanding the ROI of inbound over outbound marketing (inbound marketing, when done properly, should bring in more leads, and at a significantly lower cost).
In honor of this inbound imbecility we’ve put together the 3 most-common inbound marketing botches. Oh and we threw in their solutions, just for good measure:
1. Blah Blah Blah Text
Website text that blah blah blah’s on forever won’t win you any customers. Mumbo-jumbo technical jargon won’t win you customers either. A major sin of inbound marketers is trying to put too much into too small a space. Instead use the age-old acronym K.I.S.S.
Quick Fix: A quick customer-driven text test will go a long way to taking out the blah blah blah from your website. This is especially important for your landing page(s).
2. Self-Indulgent ‘About Us’ Pages
If blah blah blah text is a killer, self-indulgent ‘about us’ pages is the Charles Manson of conversion-killing pages.
Quick Fix: Read your ‘about us’ page. If you yawned at any point then the superficial junk needs to be trashed. Show the page to the most honest person you know and get them to strike-out the fluff. Then give whatever is left to the best wordsmith or marketing hype person you know and see what they can do with it. If you don’t know anyone like that then just try and fill it with honest words and put some verbs in it. If you’re stuck on what to write, use this basic outline: a one- or two-sentence elevator pitch on your company, then a second paragraph on your company’s directives and finally include a sub-navigation menu at the bottom to lead people to your winning, high-converting content.
3. Boring Product Pages
It sure is hard to convert visitors to customers and drive sales if your content doesn’t move them. Your best foot-forward in terms of sales are your website’s product pages, so make sure they are catchy, memorable and actionable. A great way to figure out if your product pages are as dull as Quaker meeting is to ask a few people to read your product pages and parrot the info back to you without peeking at the page again. If they can do it, congrats your content is decent. If they can’t remember a thing then you really aren’t getting the point across.
Quick Fix: Be more direct with your product pages, cut out the jargon and consider using just 2-4 bulleted points to list product features or benefits.
Pretty easy to make these common mistakes huh? You likely had at least one ah-ha moment in there, and if you did—no worries, after all this is a list of the most-common mistakes. Even experienced internet marketers make them.
To find out more internet marketing mistakes you could be making, click here.
Robin Wilding is a professionally trained Canadian journalist striving to bring journalistic-era intergity to online media. She has a second degree in Political Science--with a focus on International Relations and the developing world. Currently Robin is a contributor to several technology publications, including Brajeshwar.com, SocialTechnologyReview.com, HostingIndustryWatch.com, AnimationCareerReview.com and CompareBusinessProducts.com. She also works for several web developers; and does ghost writing for several high level executives within the technology sector. Robin's work is showcased in her portfolio: http://shownd.com/robinwilding
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