Why inbound marketing can fail in India?

Why inbound marketing can fail in India?

Businesses are adopting digital media platform for their marketing activities at a much faster pace due to its higher return on investment (ROI) underpinned by various benefits viz. faster reach to target audience, foster two way communication between brands and customers, can measure campaign's performance in real time, campaigns can be easily scaled up or down in a cost effective way. Moreover, social media has revolutionized the traditional marketing ways whether it is corporate communication or product launch or public relation.

Digital marketing has brought a major shift from mainstream outbound (interruption) marketing to inbound marketing which is permission based marketing and the focus is to get found by prospective buyers. But there are many reasons that can lead to failure of inbound marketing in India, if they aren't taken care of.

Content development isn't process driven – The main driver of inbound marketing is content. An attractive heading with good thumbnail drives traffic to the website, quality content holds the traffic and an impressive call-to-action boosts conversions. This is irony that most of the businesses lack in, consistently, developing new content with varieties (info-graphics, blogs, articles, case studies, whitepapers, presentations, webinars, video blogs etc.) whereas it should be an indispensable organizational capability for inbound marketing. Especially, SMBs are, just, limited to ordinary textual content with mundane graphics. The lack of culture for process-driven content development is failing Indian businesses to produce new content consistently and a weak inter-function/inter-department communication making it formidable. Besides, marketing head struggles in nurturing talent within the organization or hiring talent with right digital marketing skill-set. 

Learn how to nurture talent and build process-driven culture for your content strategy in my next blog – “Content development capability defines organization’s growth in the era of social media”. 

Not practising content marketing as a consultative sales approach – Sales & marketing professionals are well versed with consultative selling which is used where business problem is complex and single product/service may not address the problem. Similar to consultative sales, content marketing, also, starts from developing an understanding of customer’s business, industry, challenges and needs. After initial study, content is crafted which is relevant to customer’s industry, talks about their challenges and offers prescribed solutions. It is usually a long-term process involving collaboration of both buyer and seller. On the contrary, Indian SMBs bombard prospects with content full of features & company information leaving no place for prospects’ feedbacks or comments to foster two-way communication. This happens due to lack of vision of management team and doesn't consider content strategy a part of overall marketing strategy.

Learn how to devise exceptional content strategy from organizational marketing plans in my next blog – “Integrate content strategy with overall marketing strategy”.

Regular internet users are limited as larger Indian market resides in 3-tier cities & villages –
Though there is no concrete data available on internet users in India. As per Boston Consulting Group (BCG) report, there were 125 million internet users in India who were just 10% of its population (1.21 billion in 2011). As per report, this number will increase up to 330 million by 2016 which will be close to 25% of Indian population in 2016, if we consider 1.4% year-on-year (y-o-y) population growth rate (same as of 2011). Besides, most of the Indian population resides in sub-urban areas and villages which contribute to huge pie of Indian market.This data reflects that we are missing big market size on digital platform. The murkiness on the success of inbound marketing persists as the highest internet penetration is among people ages 18-24 years who aren’t decision makers in B2B market. 

Lear how to reduce the effect of limited internet users in my next blog "Strike a balance between digital & conventional ways of marketing".