Why inbound marketing experiments fail

Common causes of failed inbound experiments

There’s a good chance the primary cause of your failed inbound experiment boils down to one or more of these market alignment-related causes:

1. Too many alternatives look just like you or better.
2. You’re not being empathetic enough.
3. You’re not being patient enough.
4. You’re not creating the right content.

Too many alternatives look just like you or better

This may be an indicator that you’re:

1. too broad for your size, or
2. too expensive.

If this is the case, your main options are to either get narrower, reduce your price point, or try a different niche.

You’re not being empathetic enough

How do you know this?

You don’t know for certain.

Here’s a good indicator though: ask yourself this question:

Do you feel like you truly understand and convey an understanding of the biggest challenges and frustrations your customers face?

Be honest with yourself. Do you get an unpleasant feeling in your gut? If so, that’s a good sign that you’re probably not.

If you said yes, now’s your chance to back up that sense you have with some examples of what you regularly do to improve your customer empathy. Questions to ask:

1. How do you go about obtaining those insights?
2. Do you do it regularly?
3. Do you capture them?
4. Do you leverage them? How?

You’re not being patient enough

It takes complex and nuanced effort over several months or years to try to align your company’s capabilities & interests, market desires, and the platforms (e.g. search engines, ChatGPT, your website, etc) that this may live on.

In essence, you’re trying to make capitalism work for you.

What you can do differently to help alleviate some of this anxiousness:

1. 1. Take on an experimental mindset.
   2. Monitor leading indicators with self-service tools.
   3. Focus on helping your customers in a real way (gaining a deeper understanding, helping them learn).

You’re not creating the right content

Content is the core of inbound marketing. But what is the “right” content? This mainly falls into three categories:

1. type
2. quality
3. quantity

Content Type

There are a lot of types of content that can be created, but the most common types are: landing pages, articles, and case studies. Knowing how and when to create and leverage each helps you align with your potential customer and where their head is at.

Content Quality

Content quality is very important, but what that means is contextual. At the most basic level, it likely means that you’re not matching the expectations of your potential customer from one or more of these perspectives:

1. how you “speak” to them
2. what they want to learn about
3. what they want you to show them

Content Quantity

As soon as we start talking about content quantity, people’s heads often go to something like “can’t I just leverage AI to create a bunch of content for me?”. My short answer is generally going to be: “probably not”. The “why” behind that is contextual. Putting that aside for now, in most cases you shouldn’t expect to start ranking well for any topic of interest by creating a couple pieces of content. You’ve got to show the market that you actually understand the topic you’re creating content around. If for some reason you do end up ranking well for some topic that you only created a couple pieces of content for, there’s usually a good explanation for it, and that explanation often has little to do with you knocking it out of the park on those couple pieces.

Here are some articles to start to get you moving in a more reasonable direction with inbound:

1. Inbound Marketing Readiness – Self-Assessment
2. Pros and Cons of Inbound Marketing
3. Inbound marketing for engineering companies
4. Inbound marketing strategy for business services
5. Inbound marketing strategy for software development companies
6. How to benefit from inbound
7. Why your Marketing Machine is Broken

Other causes for failure

Of course there can be other causes for failed inbound experiments. Here are a few more likely causes:

1. Not figuring out how to deal with partially-observable information – this isn’t like accounting or engineering where you have most of the data you need at your fingertips. You work with what you’ve got, and you’ve got to make decisions that balance the utilization of partial / sparse data and your gut.
2. Human behavior is complex. Period. Don’t underestimate or overlook the nuances.
3. Market expectations evolve – over time what your customers need from you or how they want to interact with your business evolves. This generally doesn’t happen overnight, but needs and expectations do change.
4. Platforms evolve (e.g., the Google machine, LinkedIn, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot).

Understanding stages of failing is important

Inbound marketing experiment failures look different at different stages. And there are different decisions to be made at each.

I think in terms of three primary points of failure:

1. Failure to start – The Cricket Fail
2. Failure to stabilize – The Sporadic Fail
3. Failure to maintain steady-state – The Fading Fail

The boundaries on these stages can get a little fuzzy, and the realities more complex. But for the sake of clarity, let’s start with these three idealistic ways to talk about stages of inbound experiment fails.

Diagnosing likely causes for each of these three stages of failure requires time, energy, and reading the tea leaves. First let’s create a mental model of each of these stages, and then we can discuss some potential causes.

The Cricket Fail – Failure to start

This is when you start experimenting with a niche, but you aren’t seeing anything useful come out of it (all you hear is crickets).

What does useful mean?

Depending on how far along you are, it could mean that no one is engaging with your ads or content, or it could mean that they are, but you’re not seeing SRLs.

Why is this happening?!

It’s maddening.

You’re putting in the work (or at least you think you are). You’ve gotten things set up. You’re running tests. You’re all excited. And then…. crickets.

The suggestion for this stage: check out the common causes of failure below.

The Sporadic Fail – Failure to stabilize

This stage is when you see blips of SRLs, but you’re not seeing any patterns emerge. It looks like you’re rising above the noise sometimes, but then fall back below the noise floor others.

This can be wildly frustrating because you can see the potential, but you aren’t sure what actions to take (e.g., spending more on certain ads, updating ad copy, focusing in on certain keywords, updating landing pages, creating more articles, etc.).

The main suggestion here is to focus. There’s a good chance you’re spreading your efforts too thin.

You probably should:

1. Trust your gut (I know, scary thought).
2. Use what limited data you have as just that, a data point.
3. Take a step back and look at your problem from a totally different angle.
4. Look for roadblocks in the UX.
5. Double-down on a small fraction of your efforts.

The Fading Fail – failure to maintain steady-state

A fading failure occurs when something you were doing was working well at one point, but then you notice something has changed.

Enough SRLs were coming in that a pattern of them was visible. At some point over the course of many months or potentially a couple years, you start to notice an uncomfortable trend. Your efforts aren’t working as well as they once were.

SRLs are trending in the wrong direction!

Now what?!

An extremely valuable lesson to learn in marketing: it’s dynamic. Marketing isn’t static.

• Customer expectations evolve.
• The market evolves.
• Platforms evolve.
• Tools evolve.

Some might say “duh… everything evolves”. That’s true, but other domains often evolve in a more deterministic / controlled fashion than marketing.

So, what do you do with a fading failure?

You probably want to see if you can rescue this type of failure, assuming something drastic didn’t disrupt the market, changing the dynamics at a fundamental level.

Consider the following:

1. You’ve likely put a lot into this niche. There’s a decent chance that something has changed in one of the platforms you’re using. Dig into those platforms.
2. Explore changes in the market.
3. Explore changes in buyer expectations.

Why failure’s not necessarily something to try to avoid completely

Of course, you don’t want to throw all your time and money at things that don’t work.

B2B services marketing connects the abstract model of capitalism to the no-fluff reality of helping other companies do useful things.

This connecting point is creative in nature.

It’s messy.

It’s non-deterministic.

It’s experimental.

There are bound to be failures.

Your real goal should be to fail better more often, and fail worse less often.