The Case Against Content Marketing and Inbound Alone

There are more people who will not happen upon your content marketing efforts than people who will. You may get a fair amount of traffic. Some of that traffic may even come from your dream clients. Check your content and optimize it for search engines. use the cleverest of keyword strategies. But most of the people you need to connect with will never see your content while you passively wait to be discovered.

It’s more likely that the people who you need to connect with in order to create an opportunity will be in the group who do not find your content than the group who does. You are supposed to believe that your dream clients are researching companies in your space before deciding who to engage with. The people who actively pursue sales organizations to give them opportunities are usually letting an RFP or managing a bid process. This means that you are already behind the opportunity, having done nothing to create value in their process. Most of the people you need to connect with aren’t researching you on the web; they’re busy working.

It’s difficult to create enough compelling content to stay in front of your dream clients with a relevant message. The social web thrives on content. New content. Exciting content. Entertaining content. Shareable content. For most sales organizations, it’s difficult to create enough content, and more difficult to create compelling content to stay relevant.

You have no control over when your client becomes dissatisfied enough to change or when that dissatisfaction reaches threshold. It isn’t enough to hope that what you have published on the web will be found by your dream client when they become dissatisfied. The likelihood that your dream client finds you at the exact moment they are dissatisfied enough to explore change is about the same as winning the lottery.

You have no control over what approaches your competitors take, and your passive approach will cost you opportunities. Waiting passively for people to find you and your offering is a poor strategy. It isn’t selling. While you are waiting, your competitors are calling your dream client to ask for an appointment. Even when they fail to secure that appointment, they are becoming known, and they are ensuring that their dream client knows who they are. They may even be proactively putting their best, most compelling, most value creating content in front of the dream clients that you have on your list.

None of this is to suggest that content marketing and inbound isn’t important. It’s a reminder that content marketing and inbound alone isn’t enough. The silence you hear is the sound of your phone not ringing.