Worried Your Company Is Too 'Complex' for Inbound? Don't Be.

So you’re strongly considering diving headfirst into this whole “inbound marketing” thing with an inbound agency, but before taking the plunge, you start to feel a little nervous. You fear the learning curve for a marketer might be a little too steep, and you begin to wonder if the content hitting your inbox might be overly simplistic, or even worse, just misses the mark altogether.

You’re not alone.

These fears are common and aren’t completely unjustified. After all, there’s no way a team of marketers that don’t live and breathe your industry every day could possibly jump in with the same knowledge as someone with 5-20 years of experience (or a degree in the subject). Even if they’ve done some related work or prior research, there might still be nuances about your business you know will take considerable time to understand.

While we totally get the worry, we’re also here to say you shouldn’t underestimate inbound marketers.

You’re right to expect a learning curve.

However, don’t let that fear cause you to miss the opportunity to earn some valuable leads and customers in what should be a rewarding journey for your business!

Chandler Smith, Brand Journalist at Mojo creates a lot of content for complex businesses. In this short video, he shares Mojo's process for developing effective content no matter the subject matter complexity.

Inbound Isn’t Designed as a ‘Content Mill’

The first thing you should know about inbound marketing is that our agencies are not content mills, which can’t be said for every digital marketing group. We don’t pump out content for the sake of it, or merely use content to help get your website pages to the top of the list in Google. While search engine optimization (SEO) is taken into consideration, the most important foundation of inbound marketing is the creation of valuable content that prospects want and go out of their way to read or watch, and even share.

This means we value research, we seek the opinions of subject matter experts (SMEs) from within your company, and go to every effort possible to understand the topic at hand. Between online resources, industry publications, and the network of SMEs we develop through clients, we want to make sure what we write is accurate, credible and informative, if not a little fun.

We aim to create pieces of value and we’ll never publish anything you don’t vet thoroughly for accuracy beforehand. We want to make sure we got it right and that you feel comfortable with the end product. We know you know content is king.

Remember Who You’re Targeting

Remember not all content is written with you specifically in mind.

Sure, if your industry is especially technical, there is typically a target persona that will only consider a piece of content credible if the writer knows the jargon and demonstrates commanding expertise. On flip side of the coin, there are often personas that only understand the subject as they see it 30,000 feet from the air. Those personas need complex material simplified in a way they can digest without squinting too hard.

Where inbound marketing becomes valuable to you is through not only understanding how to write to each persona’s preference, but also providing the data detailing if specific pieces of content actually resonated with their intended audience. Inbound marketers are especially canny at taking disparate, complex pieces of information and rearranging them in such a way that a layman can understand.

That’s not to say that every piece of content should be simple enough for anyone to understand, or that highly complex content is frowned upon, but rather that it’s important to be mindful of where your content is going and why.

This is where inbound marketing shines brightest.

Engaging Partnerships Are The Most Fruitful

Having a complex business or industry is a challenge any inbound agency must take seriously, but the process is made all the easier if the partnership between the agency and the business is healthy and collaborative.

When an inbound marketing engagement begins, we don’t simply start frantically spitting new content your way. Instead, we take the time to sit down with you and iron out your messaging and campaign strategy. We get to know your personality, what makes you and your business tick, and learn a little bit more about the intricacies of your industry. By meeting you, we’ll get a strong indication of the right audiences to target and what topics to tackle first.

The engagement doesn’t stop there, of course. Just like the start of any new relationship, we’ll be getting to know one another. With that will come the growing pains of learning your voice and, yes, making sure we get our facts straight! We encourage you to point out where we went astray and how we can avoid the same mistakes in the future. In most cases, the early stages of inbound marketing is a two-way learning experience that helps refine the partnership into a well-oiled machine down the road.

The Payoff Is Real

After a few months of engagement, you will begin to feel the inbound content creators are an indispensable part of your team. At this point, we should know more than enough to be not only dangerous, but create content that turns the heads of more than a few leads.

Above all, always remember this about inbound — the stronger the engagement, the stronger the content, the better the results!