5 Common Misconceptions about Inbound Marketing As the whole online marketing industry is moving towards inbound marketing, there is also lot of promotional content written for it which creates lot of unrealistic expectations for the reader. For example, inbound marketing is not something magical nor something new which will magically transform your marketing efforts or will get two digit growth rate in matter of weeks or will get you lot of traffic and leads. Inbound marketing is more about set of practices, processes and methods which you want to follow to avoid being interruptive. Here are 5 common misconceptions about inbound marketing where people get it wrong - 1. It is just a fancy word for content marketing - I often read this that it is nothing but content marketing which is so not true. Content marketing is certainly an integral part of Inbound Marketing but you need to treat inbound marketing as a wrapper around content marketing with IM having so much more to it. Remember, IM is not about traffic (attract) but it is also about converting, closing and delight too. 2. It can be done without putting too much time, by outsoucing or by full automation - Inbound marketing do needs time and effort and it can not be fully outsourced nor software like inboundio or hubspot will make it fully autoamted. As Avinash Kaushik often says, the tools will have to do 10% and a human has to do the 90% so those who are thinking that they can automate most of the things, they are wrong. 3. It doesn't give instant results (or it takes way too long) - Both are not true. Inbound Marketing unlike ppc do not give immediate traffic nor it takes months and years to give return. What you need is proper strategy, realstic goals and patience. Remember with inbound, you will keep on getting ROi over months and even years. 4. Inconsistency, lack of personalization, not following leads, overselling, no analytics is OK - Not fully committed towards inbound marketing and expecting returns is another major problem with the people. Trying to do too many things without any metrics to gauge them, not doing any following for the leads, not using personalization in communication, trying to do hardselling and not measuring anything are signs of bad inbound marketing campaign which often starts when people think that it is OK to not do these. 5. I am fine without any strategy - This happens with way too many people than you think of. This intertia of not building any stragey and doing it intuitively sometimes can work but most often it won't and can reduce the ROI as without stragey you are probably doing many things wrong. Having a proper strategy helps to keeps costs in control and gives you better understanding of where you are currently and where you are heading. Previous Article How to to do Inbound marketing for Mobile Users Next Article List of 23 Mobile Analytics Tools useful for your Inbound Marketing