Nearly three out of every four marketers say that obtaining quality leads is their top challenge, according to Revi Media. That’s certainly no surprise, given today’s highly competitive economy and lengthening sales cycle. Traditional marketing strategies like television advertisements and cold calling require substantial effort and only yield limited results. Worse, these strategies often have limited scalability and lack an efficient, customer-oriented experience.

Inbound marketing is different. With inbound marketing, customers come to you rather than you going to them. Inbound marketing combines the best of multiple strategies, including SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing to bring highly qualified prospects right to your business. Inbound marketing does this by delivering the right piece of content to the right lead at the right time: it’s that simple. Or is it? Nearly every business today claims to do some form of inbound marketing. However, many businesses could still learn a thing or two about how inbound marketing actually works.

Wondering how to tell if your business is doing inbound marketing right or if it’s actually making a basic mistake? We’re here to help. If you’re doing any of the following, then you need to re-think your inbound marketing strategy:

1. You think marketing automation software is the same as CRM software.

CRM software is great for storing customer and prospect account information. However, this software is very different than marketing automation software. While CRM is beneficial for managing client and customer contact info, it is not designed for marketing automation or lead generation. Marketing automation software works across multiple platforms to track your leads and all the contact efforts you put into cultivating these leads, including email, social media, phone calls, and direct mail.

 2.  You think inbound lead generation is just a fancy name for your company’s automated email blast program.

Yikes! Inbound lead generation, or marketing automation for that matter, is not a fancy name for your company’s email marketing program – not even close! Inbound lead generation includes the distribution of content across multiple channels and platforms, ranging from traditional phone and direct mail campaigns to social media marketing and email marketing. Inbound marketing is not spamming your customers with “buy one, get one” emails – that’s the opposite!

 3. You think adding some local keywords to your homepage means your website is optimized for local search.

Local search optimization is one of the hottest trends for 2014 – and you need to do a lot more than just stuff a few geographic terms in your homepage to actually optimize your website for local search. With 88% of local mobile searches converting to a phone call or visit within 24 hours, according to LocalVox, you can’t afford NOT to optimize your website for local search. This starts by claiming your Google places listing, selecting a business category, and confirming that the NAP data (name, address, place) Google has listed is actually correct. Fail to do any of these basics and your site is woefully under-optimized for local search.

 4. Your business has a social media account on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn…

Is your business everywhere on social media but not actually contributing any value to your followers? Managing social media accounts can be time consuming, especially if customers use your Twitter account, for example, to tweet customer service problems. In order to make social media marketing work for your business, you need to focus your energy on maintaining accounts with the two most important networks for your potential customers.

Find out where your customers are active and go there. Be carefully not to turn your social media feed into an endless barrage of “special deal” offers and other promotional content. The content you share on social media should be genuine, authentic and engaging. It should build a relationship with your customers by bringing value into their day and telling them something they did not already know. That’s the type of content that will be shared, tweeted, commented upon and repined.

Summary

Whether you’re confused about marketing automation software or you’ve simply spread your business too thin on multiple social media accounts, remember that inbound marketing is designed to make your sales process easier, not more difficult. If inbound marketing seems far more effective when compared with traditional marketing, then you're definitely doing it right.