The beginning of inbound marketing requires a lot of perseverance. You have started with this customer-centric marketing and are wondering when you will finally see the first results. You’ve invested both money and hours of time creating helpful content. Be patient with this. Read here what you can expect from inbound marketing in the first six months:
Many companies have found that success in inbound marketing is initially difficult to see. Especially if you are a newbie in the field and have little content and website visitors behind you.
To give you a realistic view of things, we’ve broken this down into a typical 6 month time frame. This clarifies what to expect from your efforts and when.
Month 1 – Time to plan
The first month is entirely devoted to planning. Your inbound marketing team does a lot of research on existing and suitable new content and creates a content audit. This is an inventory of your website, i.e. the status quo. To do this, you should find out how much movement or traffic is already on your website. Developing the buyer persona is also very important – this is a blueprint of who you ultimately want to reach with your content.
So the first month is all about building the engine that will eventually propel you down the road to success.
Month 2 – Ready to launch
In the second month you should be ready to start your inbound activities. This can be a new website or just an overhaul of the old one. Perhaps you have already created your first marketing offer, such as an e-book or white paper.
You can now present this as a content offer on your blog and tease it with a call-to-action (CTA). This includes, among other things, the appropriate landing page with a form to be able to query information and data from your readers.
If your blog has not been available online before, it should be now at the latest. And the first contents are now also published. As you can see, we’re making progress!
Month 3 – First results are still a long time coming
Now you have slowly gotten used to creating content regularly and publishing it as a blog article, for example. You can also promote your blog articles by automatically sending emails to your contacts and on your customers’ social media channels. This guarantees consistent traffic to your site – now let’s talk about the fuel you need to fire up that engine you built in the first month.
Especially if you’re new to the inbound methodology and don’t have a lot of content to show yet, it can take well over a month for someone to come across your content in a search engine. This has to do with the process that Google goes through when indexing new content. This means for you: work on your visibility and credibility with measures for search engine optimization (SEO).
If you want to delve deeper into the topic of SEO optimization, here are some helpful tips:
- Whitepaper: Answers to the 16 most important SEO questions
- Blog post: SEO basics: How your content is found on the web
- Blog Post: 10 Common SEO Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Month 4 – Website traffic starts to change
In the fourth month you should start to see changes in your website traffic – especially in the growth of organic search, i.e. the search results of a search engine that are not influenced by the targeted placement of advertisements.
In addition, you may have already won some leads . Especially if you work with an agency, they keep an eye on the important and relevant contacts and help you to generate leads right from the start and feed them into a sales process.
Read more: 4 tips on how to optimize your website for lead generation
But even if you’re going it alone and haven’t been able to generate many leads yet – don’t panic! You are still at the beginning.
Month 5 – First differences become visible
The quality of your leads has now increased – some of them are now interested in talking to you about your products and services.
Your content will be more present in Google queries and this will also be reflected in the traffic on your website – here you will slowly but surely see a difference from before. In a positive sense!
Month 6 – The tide begins to turn
The first five months were tough, but your hard work is finally paying off. Depending on how long the customer journey is in your industry or for your company, this is unfortunately not necessarily a “new customer”. But they are the first leads in your sales pipeline. And that’s a really good feeling – we certainly agree on that.
You still have a long way to go, but you have created a powerful engine that is behind you from now on. It gets better from here!
Want to see results faster?
Don’t forget: the buyer’s journey of your desired customers is decisive for the time it takes to see the results of your inbound marketing. This is the path a person takes to become a customer. Depending on the situation, it can take from five to 18 months before you notice any tangible changes.
Conclusion
The first few months of inbound marketing can actually be frustrating, we’re no strangers to that. The path is not always easy, you invest time and money and get nothing in return, so it seems. But don’t worry too quickly – it’s perfectly normal. You will see results. Give it some time and use the knowledge you have gathered to further optimize your processes.
With this article we give you a rough overview of how the first six months of inbound marketing work and what results you can expect and when. But remember, if the six months are up and you still feel like you’re stuck, your persona’s buyer’s journey may just be longer than you originally thought!
And please don’t forget in all this theoretical consideration that we assume functioning sales processes. If the inbound sales area still has to be defined and set up and employees trained, then the entire process can of course take longer.