• by Neil Patel , May 6, 2019

Inbound marketing (“a method of attracting prospects to products or services through the creation of related content and incentives,” according to ResponsePoint) works well overall.

What’s not to love about it? You build assets that grow in value, attracting more and more leads then you can handle over time.

No more “renting” access to audiences through big-budget campaigns that, by definition, only have a short shelf life.

Unfortunately, inbound marketing success isn’t always guaranteed. Here are three cases where inbound marketing fails (and what you should be doing instead).

1. Inbound marketing takes too long. Inbound marketing can pay off handsomely — a few years after starting it. And that's the main problem with it.

In time, organic search traffic will almost always be your top traffic source. Virtually all websites on the internet are like this.

However, Google is known to keep new sites in its “sandbox” for the first few months of its life. That means you can do all the tricks in the book, and your odds at ranking for anything will still be slim to none.

Work hard, and around the six-month mark, you might start ranking for long-tail keywords. These will be fairly low traffic, though, so it won't be enough to make a huge dent in your bottom line.

It's only after the 12- to 18-month mark that you can start ranking for anything remotely competitive. And then around two years, you can go after the biggest stuff in your space.

So all of this time, you're pouring money into a black hole that's literally not giving you anything back in return.

The good news is that your ROI on months 24+ will eclipse what you see in the first 12 — without virtually any extra effort or investment. But the bad news is that you have to put in the work and be patient to get to that point.

Here's one of the reasons why it takes so long:

2. There’s more, better competition than ever before. Back when I first started, SEO wasn't nearly as difficult as it was today.

This was before the infamous Panda and Penguin algorithm updates. But it was also before every single company known to man started pumped out content, too.

Companies are spending more money than ever before on content creation, email campaigns, webinars, and inbound marketing platforms.

So there's more competition --and more sophisticated, too.

That means it's harder than ever for you to break through all of the noise.

My favorite way to shortcut this process is to combine paid advertising with content marketing. This way, you're able to do both: you can still keep the emphasis on building your own assets, while also accelerating the time it takes to build your brand and start ranking.

Social advertising options are usually your best bet for content distribution because all of them are coming out with the ability to laser-target the exact people who'd be perfect customers for you.

LinkedIn, for example, has a Matched Audiences feature that allows you to run ads to people who've already been to your site, who're already on your email list or inside your customer database.

Just make sure that you're using these campaigns to reach the right type of people. Here's why:

3. It’s hard to reach hard-to-reach people. The last case where inbound marketing fails is where you're exclusively relying on it to reach hard-to-reach people.

Take CEOs, or anyone else in the C-Suite for that matter.

These incredibly busy people spend somewhere around 70% of their time inside meetings, according to a study cited in the Harvard Business Review.

Now, do you think these people are also reading blog posts in their spare time or sitting on hour-long webinars? Of course not.

So if this is the market you're trying to reach, inbound marketing is not going to be that helpful.

How on earth do you reach these people?

You need a direct sales component: account-based marketing and even old school methods like direct mail, to interrupt their day. You often have no other choice to get a hold of them.

You can also get in front of these people by building your brand in the places they already hang out. For example, speaking at major industry conferences can typically be the best way.

The point is that yes, inbound marketing can be amazing. It's the perfect choice for many companies, as long as you plan for the downsides, too.

And it means tailoring your approach depending on whom you're trying to reach, knowing that the busiest executives won't come through your webinar funnel anytime soon, either.