10 reasons why your B2B Inbound Marketing strategy is failing
Posted: Sun Jan 05, 2025 10:41 am
1. You haven't worked on your Personas well
Your personas are the foundation of your Inbound Marketing strategy.
Inbound Marketing, let us remember, is a strategy which consists of offering your target audience high added value content which meets their expectations, their problems and the questions they ask themselves throughout the purchasing process.
To do this successfully, it is essential to know your target inside out.
To work effectively on your personas, I have written here a 4-step methodology that we use for ourselves and our clients!
2. You don’t understand your target’s purchasing journey
Inbound Marketing is about attracting the buyer's attention and feeding netherlands email list their purchasing thoughts. Concretely, depending on their context and level of maturity, you send the buyer content corresponding to the questions they are likely to ask.
The idea here is to make the buyer's decision-making easier.
Buyer journey: the length of the sales cycle - Inbound Marketing
For your Inbound Marketing strategy to be successful, it is important to know the behavior of your target during the different stages of the purchasing journey and to cover it with your content .
Very often I come across companies that only write so-called Decision phase content. This cannot work, especially if you are an innovative company since the market is by definition not very mature.
Want to Take Stock of Your Strategy? Take Advantage of a Free Inbound Marketing Audit!
3. Your Marketing and Sales departments are not working together
Inbound Marketing is a simple strategy on paper: marketing generates qualified leads, matures them, and then passes them on to salespeople who convert.
Unfortunately, the reality on the ground is often different.
It is essential that Marketing and Sales collaborate in order to work on a joint definition of the ideal prospect (our famous personas) and the characteristics of a mature prospect.
This is a sine qua non condition for marketing to generate quality leads and for salespeople to succeed in converting them.
It is also essential that Marketing and Sales have complementary objectives to move forward in the same direction.
Here, I offer you some concrete actions to align marketing and sales during the day.
4. You're not writing enough content
The promise of Inbound Marketing is enticing: attracting customers rather than chasing them.
However, this promise may suggest that all this is done by magic or, at least, with less effort than in a traditional marketing and sales prospecting strategy.
This is false.
Instead, inbound marketing allows you to allocate your efforts to more efficient tasks.
As proof, in order to do Inbound Marketing successfully, it is essential to write a minimum of 2 blog articles per week and per persona .
5. Your content is not well referenced on Google
Writing content is great, but if it's not SEO-friendly, no one will see it.
61% of B2B buyers start the purchasing journey with a Google search .
If your Inbound Marketing strategy is not attracting enough visitors or your leads are not qualified enough, there is a good chance that your SEO strategy is not good.
You are probably not using the right keywords that your target audience is entering during their purchasing process .
6. You don't promote your content
SEO represents on average 50% of visits to a B2B website. In other words, it is not enough to reference your content well to do Inbound Marketing successfully.
It is important to use all the channels at your disposal and used by your target to directly or indirectly lead their purchasing consideration.
I naturally think here of social networks and emailing .
7. You're not using the right tools
Very often I come across B2B companies that have a good Inbound Marketing strategy but fail to achieve their goals because they are not using the right tools.
Or rather, they are multiplying the tools: between social networks, the tool for administering their website, the emailing tool and what do I know, these companies are also multiplying the holes in the racket .
It’s difficult to measure the ROI of your Inbound Marketing strategy when you don’t really know how many leads you generate each month.
To succeed in your Inbound Marketing strategy, it is essential to eventually equip yourself with a Marketing Automation tool that allows you to carry out all actions under the same interface.
8. You don't manage your leads well
To convert your leads into customers, marketing must pass them on to sales at the right time.
Aligning marketing and sales: a crucial issue
Very often, the failure of your Inbound Marketing strategy comes from the fact that marketing directly transmits the leads generated to sales.
However, in B2B, 73% of the leads you generate are not ready to buy.
It is essential to measure the maturity level of your leads and to adequately nurture their purchasing thinking in order to pass them on to sales representatives when they are hot.
9. Your conversion funnel is not optimal
The success of your Inbound Marketing strategy depends on the quality of your website which must be optimized for conversion.
If your website does not offer enough call-to-action buttons, if they are not visible enough or if your landing pages are not adapted to the buyer's expectations, your inbound marketing strategy will be a failure.
To go further here, I suggest you consult our methodology for transforming your website into a qualified lead machine .
10. You don't have a clear strategy
This is probably the mistake I encounter most often: if you tell me that you have a strategy "in your head", I deduce that you don't have a strategy.
I've been doing Inbound Marketing since 2010 and I have yet to see a B2B company do it successfully without having a documented strategy.
Inbound Marketing is an ultra-powerful methodology but it requires respecting all of its concepts. Without a documented strategy, it is humanly impossible.
Your personas are the foundation of your Inbound Marketing strategy.
Inbound Marketing, let us remember, is a strategy which consists of offering your target audience high added value content which meets their expectations, their problems and the questions they ask themselves throughout the purchasing process.
To do this successfully, it is essential to know your target inside out.
To work effectively on your personas, I have written here a 4-step methodology that we use for ourselves and our clients!
2. You don’t understand your target’s purchasing journey
Inbound Marketing is about attracting the buyer's attention and feeding netherlands email list their purchasing thoughts. Concretely, depending on their context and level of maturity, you send the buyer content corresponding to the questions they are likely to ask.
The idea here is to make the buyer's decision-making easier.
Buyer journey: the length of the sales cycle - Inbound Marketing
For your Inbound Marketing strategy to be successful, it is important to know the behavior of your target during the different stages of the purchasing journey and to cover it with your content .
Very often I come across companies that only write so-called Decision phase content. This cannot work, especially if you are an innovative company since the market is by definition not very mature.
Want to Take Stock of Your Strategy? Take Advantage of a Free Inbound Marketing Audit!
3. Your Marketing and Sales departments are not working together
Inbound Marketing is a simple strategy on paper: marketing generates qualified leads, matures them, and then passes them on to salespeople who convert.
Unfortunately, the reality on the ground is often different.
It is essential that Marketing and Sales collaborate in order to work on a joint definition of the ideal prospect (our famous personas) and the characteristics of a mature prospect.
This is a sine qua non condition for marketing to generate quality leads and for salespeople to succeed in converting them.
It is also essential that Marketing and Sales have complementary objectives to move forward in the same direction.
Here, I offer you some concrete actions to align marketing and sales during the day.
4. You're not writing enough content
The promise of Inbound Marketing is enticing: attracting customers rather than chasing them.
However, this promise may suggest that all this is done by magic or, at least, with less effort than in a traditional marketing and sales prospecting strategy.
This is false.
Instead, inbound marketing allows you to allocate your efforts to more efficient tasks.
As proof, in order to do Inbound Marketing successfully, it is essential to write a minimum of 2 blog articles per week and per persona .
5. Your content is not well referenced on Google
Writing content is great, but if it's not SEO-friendly, no one will see it.
61% of B2B buyers start the purchasing journey with a Google search .
If your Inbound Marketing strategy is not attracting enough visitors or your leads are not qualified enough, there is a good chance that your SEO strategy is not good.
You are probably not using the right keywords that your target audience is entering during their purchasing process .
6. You don't promote your content
SEO represents on average 50% of visits to a B2B website. In other words, it is not enough to reference your content well to do Inbound Marketing successfully.
It is important to use all the channels at your disposal and used by your target to directly or indirectly lead their purchasing consideration.
I naturally think here of social networks and emailing .
7. You're not using the right tools
Very often I come across B2B companies that have a good Inbound Marketing strategy but fail to achieve their goals because they are not using the right tools.
Or rather, they are multiplying the tools: between social networks, the tool for administering their website, the emailing tool and what do I know, these companies are also multiplying the holes in the racket .
It’s difficult to measure the ROI of your Inbound Marketing strategy when you don’t really know how many leads you generate each month.
To succeed in your Inbound Marketing strategy, it is essential to eventually equip yourself with a Marketing Automation tool that allows you to carry out all actions under the same interface.
8. You don't manage your leads well
To convert your leads into customers, marketing must pass them on to sales at the right time.
Aligning marketing and sales: a crucial issue
Very often, the failure of your Inbound Marketing strategy comes from the fact that marketing directly transmits the leads generated to sales.
However, in B2B, 73% of the leads you generate are not ready to buy.
It is essential to measure the maturity level of your leads and to adequately nurture their purchasing thinking in order to pass them on to sales representatives when they are hot.
9. Your conversion funnel is not optimal
The success of your Inbound Marketing strategy depends on the quality of your website which must be optimized for conversion.
If your website does not offer enough call-to-action buttons, if they are not visible enough or if your landing pages are not adapted to the buyer's expectations, your inbound marketing strategy will be a failure.
To go further here, I suggest you consult our methodology for transforming your website into a qualified lead machine .
10. You don't have a clear strategy
This is probably the mistake I encounter most often: if you tell me that you have a strategy "in your head", I deduce that you don't have a strategy.
I've been doing Inbound Marketing since 2010 and I have yet to see a B2B company do it successfully without having a documented strategy.
Inbound Marketing is an ultra-powerful methodology but it requires respecting all of its concepts. Without a documented strategy, it is humanly impossible.