Inbound Marketing – what’s the risk of waiting to get started?

My theory is that breaking into the top few spots on Google/Bing will become harder and harder over the next several years. This makes it harder for new companies to enter the market.

Before we get too far, let’s acknowledge the potential bias. Yes, RocLogic tends to lean toward inbound marketing. So yes, it’s possible that I’ve got blind spots, but I think being aware of that helps keep me oriented.

Also, this isn’t an attempt to create a false sense of urgency. I actually hope I’m wrong and that my thinking is flawed (because it’s going to make my life harder), but unfortunately, I don’t think I am…

I’m specifically referring to the B2B services world (because that’s the world I live in).

The biggest risk occurs when your solutions or services can’t be well-differentiated from your competitors in the manner that potential customers are looking for them.

Differentiation could be in the form of geography, industry, or application subset. The exact timing of when the window starts closing depends very much on the specifics of adoption of inbound marketing within your industry, and how well you can find a viable niche.

You risk getting muscled out by larger players, or by a company that’s willing to put more effort in than you. In some cases this may drive you all the way to the point of: acquire or die, grow or die, be acquired or die, or find a narrower niche or die.

So why do I think you won’t want to wait too long to get started with inbound?

Top reasons you’ll want to consider inbound marketing sooner rather than later

  1. Competent active incumbents are harder to dislodge than occupying the space in the first place. There’s natural re-enforcement that takes place from a time, engagement, and linking perspective. You’ll need to either be better or differentiate in order to dislodge them.
  2. You’ll do inbound poorly (or at least very sub-optimally) at first, so you need time to iterate to improve. Doing inbound well seems to require different experience and thought processes vs older methods.
  3. It takes a long time (years) to build trust with the Google machine. You can’t just select a topic, say “I want to own this space” and then blink to make it so. Google’s algorithms are super complex, and they like to be shown from many sources and visitors that your content is useful and that your domain is trustworthy.
  4. People seem to be trusting Google more and more to provide the answers to their queries. To me that suggests that the distribution of clicks vs position will narrow (in other words, a larger percentage of clicks will go to fewer and fewer pages).
  5. Showing up in alternate search result categories (eg. Featured snippets) is increasing the complexity of the playing field, as they don’t utilize the same ranking factors in the same manner. That means you could own the top organic slot for a topic, and still have someone pop above you for a featured snippet or similar.
  6. Google Ads is already getting super expensive.
  7. There are non-linear affects in play from a ranking and conversion perspective. In many cases, just being like everyone else won’t get you where you want to be. You need to rise above the noise floor.

Why you want the first-mover advantage

Assuming you’re a smaller (say less than ~100 employees) B2B company where most of your revenue is services-based (or custom solutions), you’ll have a much better chance of dominating a niche set of topics before there’s a strong active contender than after there is one.

Why?

Because time can be on your side for positive reinforcement of your position for the niche topic(s).

If you wait until you need to try to dislodge an incumbent, you’re going to need to do better than what’s out there. You can’t just be a copycat. What good would that do? You’ll need to do better with some combination of these 3 aspects:

  1. Better engagement
  2. Higher authority
  3. Differentiated positioning

Which position would you rather be in?

Next Steps

Ready to get started on the journey and need a guide? Inbound is a long road with lots of bumps along the way, but it’s also a fascinating journey that helps you become stronger as a company, because you’ll be forced to be more realistic and empathetic.

Yes, please help

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