After we launched our first inbound marketing campaign for the agency, 24 hours went by and our first lead came in. Simply said, it was a rush. 48 hours went by and another came in. I couldn’t believe it. I would literally malfunction each time they came in and would refresh the browser a couple times for some weird reason. At the rate we were going, our online leads for the end of the month had to be good.
 
Sadly to say, the excitement didn’t last long and a few leads would trickle in for the next couple months. You would think that by your 6th year in business you would have clear answers to; Who are our readers? What is our one laser focused marketing strategy? Who is that top tier persona we’re aiming for? The focus on our own marketing efforts turned out to be more difficult than expected.

As we face these inbound marketing challenges, our traffic has improved but we have yet to close our first client using our HubSpot strategy. Here are a few areas we are reevaluating and focusing on to help improve our own inbound marketing efforts.

Determine That Top Tier Persona

​Really digging deep on who exactly you will apply all your online efforts to one persona is key. Our OCD kicked in so of course we created five target personas. Technically we had no strategy and our efforts were all over the place. We are still looking to finalize our niche, but this is something we are just now prioritizing.

Strategic Blogging

Of course we did not eat our broccoli first for this one. We dove in immediately with design and web development. We left writing for last. When we started writing, we had everyone at the agency involved. Our hallway discussions were, “Hey, what’s your topic this week?”. Instead of, “Who are you writing to this week?”. When we looked at all blogs by the end of the month, each blog was speaking to someone different. Now, most of our time is invested on blogging the right content to two targets max. Design and development has become secondary.

Email Marketing

We started sharing our blog post through emails. We were hesitant about this since the emails were our own contacts. These are all businesses we know personally, businesses we see frequently at networking events and companies we do business with. We only started this recently and it’s been interesting to discover we have readers. Now each time we think of a topic, we think about what they would like to read. As simple as this may seem, this list of contacts has helped us tremendously to determine what to write about and most importantly, discover to whom are we writing to. This has been a struggle to uncover for many at the agency and email marketing was a solution.

Take Advantage of Top Visited Pages

For many years we’ve had contact forms on our website. They were never filled out so we removed them about a couple years ago and replaced them with simple contact information. Tuesday mornings we have strategy meetings and we looked at our top visited pages. It turned out that our contact us page was number one. We updated this page with a HubSpot online form and within the week we had conversions. It could be that our previous online form was setup with the wrong questions. We will continue to monitor our top visited pages and determine how we can take advantage of the traffic.
 
How has your inbound marketing experience been so far? Are you having similar struggles or are they completely different? Feel free to comment them below and maybe we can divide and conquer together faster.
 
Side note: I’ll make sure to share stats a month or two from now to see how our new efforts are panning out. I’ll make sure to share what has been working for us as we continue to use HubSpot, and any other inbound marketing challenges we may run into.