Inbound marketing is a constantly evolving field. New strategies, software, and ideas are coming out every day. The need to keep up with new ideas and strategies while retaining some form of consistency in your marketing is very real. Yet, how do you fulfill that need and stay within budget? Here are 3 common problems your marketing team may be facing.
1) Lack of experience or lack of staff
There’s a lot of knowledge and experience that is needed to execute a successful inbound marketing strategy because of its various parts. You need a team that understands:
- Lead generation
- Lead nurturing
- Email marketing
- SEO
- Graphic design
- Content creation
- Event organizing (webinars, podcasts, etc.)
- Social media
- Etc.
Of course, most of your team members will be proficient in more than one of these areas but there are only so many hats a person can wear before they become top heavy and fall over. Besides the medical liability from your employees constantly falling over, you have to consider the burnout they face as individuals, and the quality you sacrifice by not bringing in someone proficient in the fields your team may struggle in.
A few options available to you are:
- Training those in-house employees with the least amount of work on their plate – (Con: finding them)
- Bringing in an expert on as needed basis – (Con: their knowledge and expertise leaves your organization with them)
- Hire an inbound marketing agency that can help you develop strategies and processes to grow and develop your in-house marketing team setting you up for future success – (Con: Finding the right organization to fit your budget and vision can be time-consuming)
2) Lack of reporting
It’s easy for marketers to get overwhelmed when it comes to measuring their marketing efforts. They have too many tools, not the right tools, or simply don’t know which metrics matter. Yet, metrics are what ties their budget and results together, what makes the case for an increase in budget, and creates a comprehensive, sure-fire method to gather, organize, and interpret campaign data. From which they can improve their marketing strategy for the next time around.
When the marketing team doesn’t have the necessary data and results analysis that they need to communicate their success or problem-solving strategies to their superiors, they may feel unable to move forward, and unsure of how to present their plans to their executive management. This gap in communication regarding the effectiveness of a marketing strategy can be very stressful for all parties involved.
The key here (unsurprisingly) is to incorporate a process. There must be an established process for creating a strategy, delivering on that process, measuring success, and making future changes so that those details can be communicated up the chain of command.
3) Lack of communication
As we talked about above, a lack of reporting can cause tension and make communication very difficult between higher executives and the marketing department. Another critical area where communication fails is when it comes time to close that loop between sales and marketing. There are three main reasons why there may be a disconnect between your sales and marketing department:
- Marketing and sales do not have a joint definition of what makes a lead sales-qualified
- Sales does not have a process in place for closing those qualified leads
- Marketing’s leads aren’t sales-qualified yet
The idea here is to work together to bring each other forward. There should be clear communication between sales and marketing about whether or not the leads that are coming through are quality leads or not. It is vital that there is an effective feedback system in place between your marketing team and the sales team. It’ll help keep your departments connected and working towards the same goal: getting new customers.
If you still find your marketing team is struggling in proving results, check out our complimentary ebook below.
