An experienced marketer will constantly analyse their inbound marketing to ensure that it is performing as effectively as it can do so i.e. driving the highest amount of conversions your way.
They will use these metrics to determine which methods of inbound marketing are effective for them and which ones could do with a little bit of change. There are, of course, many, many different ways in which you can measure your inbound marketing results.
The technique that you use will, of course, be dependent on which methods you are using for your inbound marketing and what industry you are operating in.
On this page, we are going to take a little look at some of the ways to measure inbound marketing results and the effectiveness of your campaigns.
The only companies out there which may use activity as a method for result checking will be those companies who are looking to boost brand awareness e.g. Coca Cola or McDonalds but, even then, these companies will still be concerned about whether their campaign is making them money. In short, you do not wish to be using the wrong metric analysis techniques on your campaign.
Percentage of leads generated through inbound marketing
The majority of people out there will not convert straight away, even if they reached your website by way of your inbound marketing. They may return later on. By then, however, you will think that they accessed your site directly as opposed to through inbound marketing.
This can make it very difficult to measure just which leads came from your marketing efforts. You, therefore, need a specific system in place which can handle this. There are a few systems on the market that you can use. inBASE are huge fans of HubSpot and are a HubSpot Agency Partner.
One of the major plus points in using a platform such as HubSpot is to leverage Closed Loop Analytics, that is, knowing with clarity what content resulted in which lead and the revenue impact that had when the sale was closed. It ties back all your investments into a revenue metric and proves ROI.
If, however, you do not have a decent budget in mind for your inbound marketing (although, you should try to), you can go down the ‘cheaper’ route of analysing your conversion rate by giving out different links or special discount codes through your inbound marketing methods. This is a technique often used in print advertising (many adverts have specific discount codes so a company knows which adverts are effective and which not so much). Try to incorporate that into your campaign and you will be able to see whether you are doing a good job. On this point, you should check out HubSpots article on How to Build An Inbound Marketing Platform Without Using HubSpot - its an excellent read.
Are people returning to your website?
This is a pretty ‘rough and ready’ method for analysing the effectiveness of your campaigns but it can, in most cases, provide you with a decent amount of information as to where your traffic is coming from. If a good proportion of your visitors are returning and converting, there is a good chance that they originally came from your inbound marketing.
However, if people are not returning, something is wrong with your website. There is something which, once the website visitor is on your site, is encouraging them to leave. You need to get to the bottom of what is causing it. Most marketers will tell you that a good return rate for many companies is about 15%. If it is not near that figure, something is wrong.
Social engagement
As mentioned previously, you do not want to be focusing on activity too much in most situations. However, it can be beneficial in some cases. For example, comments and shares on your Facebook or LinkedIn pages will show that people are engaging with your brand. You are, basically, going to be nurturing the customer via these methods. They may not buy now but they may do a few weeks or months down the line.
You will need to have some method in place which will allow you to determine which customers who engaged with your brand are going on to purchase from you.
Where is your traffic coming from?
Any good analytics program out there will tell you exactly which sources your traffic is coming from.
If traffic from one source is growing at a rapid rate it means that there is a good chance that this method of marketing is effective.
However you are, of course, going to need to look into whether this particular method is leading to conversions and you will need to look into what is leading to this conversions or causing people not to purchase from you.
Email marketing
If you are engaging in email marketing, and you really should be, you need to analyse what your overall delivery rate is and what your overall open rate is.
If your emails are not being opened or the links are not being clicked through in these emails (this is something which you will be able to easily measure), this is a good indication that this method of marketing is not working for you and that changes need to be made.