Top 5 Inbound Marketing Metrics You Should Be Measuring

Marketing is marketing, right? Wrong. Outbound marketing and inbound marketing are entirely different ball games. Outbound marketing is all about getting in front of your potential customers – whether they want you there or not – and inbound marketing is all about bringing your potential customers to you.

Can you guess which approach is more effective? [Hint: That was a rhetorical question!]

In order to be a successful inbound marketer, you need to recognize that success with inbound marketing cannot be measured in the same way as the success of outbound marketing. I mean, think about it – unless you’re running an additional outbound advertising campaign, very rarely will you be considering traditional outbound metrics such as your cost-per-click (CPCs) as benchmarks for success.

Instead, with inbound marketing you have so many other indicdators to consider, from website visitors, to lead acquisition, to conversions, and more.

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So… The question is, if you’re not measuring what you previously considered a key indicator, what should you be measuring?

New Business from Inbound Activities

This where the rubber meets the road when it comes to inbound marketing. Point blank – have you generated new business as a result of your inbound marketing activities?

Unlike many outbound marketing activities, you can actually measure the ROI of inbound marketing in a way that is concrete and objective thanks to the magic of the internet. There are plenty of ways to do this manually using tracking URLs, Google Analytics, spreadsheets and the like, but why go to all that effort when today’s marketing automation software platforms make this so simple? Here at Quintain, we use HubSpot to measure the impact of our inbound marketing activities. With Hubspot’s Sources Report, this is very easy to understand. You can see exactly how your website visitors found you, including who’s coming in from organic search, from social media, from email marketing referrals and even direct traffic.

The beauty of the Sources Report is that it doesn’t just tell you where your visitors came from, it also tells you how many of those visitors converted into leads, and then into customers – and it breaks it all down by channel. If you’re doing your inbound marketing effectively, you should be seeing inbound results under all sources but direct traffic.

As your business makes its transition from outbound to inbound marketing, it will start seeing results, specifically in terms of the quantity of leads and the cost of customer acquisition (COCA). According to Demand Metric, inbound marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing, yet each dollar spent on inbound marketing generates 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing.

Wow.

Website Traffic to Lead Ratio

It’s fair to say that if your website traffic is increasing, and you’ve strategically included numerous calls to action (CTAs) around your site, you should be seeing your leads increase as well. If you’re not satisfied with your overall visitor-to-lead conversion rate, take a look at the conversion rates of individual pages on your website. Start with your best performing pages – the ones that attract the greatest number of visitors. Ask the following question:

• Do these pages have calls to action?


• Are the CTAs related to the topic of the page on which they are placed?


• Are they appropriate given the various stages of the buyer’s journey?


• Are they placed appropriately and designed with eye catching colors?

Understanding which CTAs to offer visitors is critical. You don’t want to place your Bottom of the Funnel offer on a Top of the Funnel page, regardless of how heavily trafficked it is.

Landing Page Conversion Rates

This may sound redundant – after all, aren’t landing pages the pages that convert your website traffic into your leads? Yep, that is true. But landing pages are in many cases more powerful than typical website pages. I like to think of landing page visitors as members of a captive audience. After all, according to Marketing Sherpa, 42% of offer-related graphics on landing pages aren’t clickable and 16% of landing pages don’t have navigation bars. That means that when your visitors are on your landing pages, they’re kind of stuck there, unless they choose to actually exit your page or they convert on your offer.

So use that real estate wisely:

• Make your landing pages easy to read


• Make them colorful – interesting not gaudy


• Make them direct

Essentially, do what you can (test, test, test!) to see what leads to the highest visitor-to-lead conversion ratio.

Lead to Customer Conversion Ratio

This seems to be the hot topic lately, and it goes back to the fact that outbound and inbound marketing are so different. Outbound marketing, though annoying if you’re on the receiving end of the efforts, ensures that a company’s salespeople are going only after qualified people – it’s whether they want the product or service that is unknown. Inbound marketing is the opposite; you know your audience interested, and you can watch them gobble up the content that you’re producing… But you don’t know that they are qualified or they’re even planning to purchase in the next few months.

Or do you?

If you’re not happy with your lead to customer ratio, make more of an effort to qualify or even score your leads (use this template to set up lead scoring). Understand whether they’re Marketing Qualified (MQLs) or Sales Qualified (SQLs), and begin to nurture them. After all, According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost.

Marketing-Influenced Customer Revenue

While it’s great that inbound marketing is growing your site traffic and boosting your gathered leads, is inbound actually bringing in revenue? After all, at the end of the day, that’s what marketing – whether outbound or inbound – is all about. While marketers (myself included) will say that marketing’s all about satisfying the needs of the consumers, it’s not. Marketing is all about growing your business through an increased customer base. So unfortunately, at the end of the day, it really all comes down to revenue. But lucky for you, businesses that blog (the core of inbound) are 13x more likely to enjoy positive ROI.

The inbound marketing metrics outlined in this post are the best ways to get started. From here, there are plenty of other metrics you can track – but getting the basics established is the most important part.

Author: Kristen Patel

As a Marketing Manager, Kristen works with Quintain’s clients on every step of their inbound marketing journey. She brings to the table experience in social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing and retention marketing. Kristen graduated Cum Laude with a B.S. in International Marketing from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts…. View full profile ›

Top 5 Inbound Marketing Metrics You Should Be Measuring

Facebook: Content Creation, Content Marketing, GrowthHacking And Inbound Marketing

Summary

• FB’s Instant Articles is its entry into a very lucrative, fast growing space in which it has only until now been an indirect player.


• FB’s Instant Articles are genius in that it will allow it to eventually become the Pangaea of publishing.


• If so, FB stands to benefit greatly from creating its Grand Bazaar marketplace of content, content that it can monetize and choke into potential market share.


• If FB sees the results I think it will see it could alter the entire content creation and content marketing space.


• Continue to be long FB as a core position.

Facebook’s (NASDAQ:FB) launch of Instant Articles is a tectonic shift in the way content creation, content marketing, growthhacking, and inbound marketing will be done. At least it will be. It could be much more than that. I’ll explain.

(click to enlarge)

So, for those unfamiliar FB has created a content distribution engine that is separate from its “normal” newsfeed and paid advertisement mechanism.

FB’s Instant Articles are differentiated (via post borders – National Geographic can surround it’s IA’s with its branded yellow border; branded text – think New York Times, etc.; video auto play; etc.) and more recognizable than any of its other “content”. Instant Articles will be more eye catching than anything else currently available and will load “10X faster than the mobile web (SOURCE: Mike Matas – Instant Articles Project Designer via a May techcrunch.com interview)”.

This is a good thing for those creating the content.

As the popularity of engagement marketing has grown, and the consensus realization that engagement marketing actually works has grown, content and how to deliver that content as was intended by the creator has become a core focus of companies looking to draw prospects into the sales funnel.

Instant Articles will help with that in several ways. As detailed above they’re faster and more responsive, they’re interactive and immersive, they’re simple and scalable, and they allow for the greatest level of non-owned website customization and control. What I mean by that is I can create anything I’d like, assuming spend wasn’t a limiting factor, on my own digital properties but to be able to mass distribute that on a non-owned property was something that was simply unavailable until now. I think this matters.

FB has created Instant Article so that it won’t cause disruption with normal content creation, content marketing, growthhacking practices or data tracking. Instant Articles allow for anything ranging from basic text to video to graphics to be deployed and Instant Articles allows for these to be compatible with existing analytics platforms.

(click to enlarge)

This is also a good thing for those creating the content and for those pre-Instant Article helping facilitate the content marketing and distribution.

The fact that the data from Instant Articles can still be collected makes this a tool that I think will see wide and growing adoption in time. It might even become the Pangaea of publishing. I really mean that. I also think the maturation of Instant Articles could be the driving force behind many content creating, inbound marketing laggards to get with the program.

This is a good thing for the current Content Creation and Marketing Cartel that includes names like Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL), HubSpot (NYSE:HUBS), Marketo (NASDAQ:MKTO), and it might even be a good thing for content creation and housing engines WordPress, Squarespace, Wix.com (NASDAQ:WIX), and the soon to launch The Grid.

Anything that can drive wider spread adoption of anything we’ve talked about facilitated by these channels simply increases the demand for the services. All driven by the endpoint housing unit, FB.

Which is good for FB.

If this evidences itself to be too good for FB, this might be bad for the Cartel above.

FB has invested quite a bit of time and presumably money in getting this right, including trotting out the sacrificial testing lamb Paper in the development process. Many speculate Paper was simply a way to gather intel on an eventual Instant Article like product. I would have to agree.

I don’t think FB has any current intention of monetizing Instant Article outside of what is obvious – creating ad revenue, deepening partnerships with publishers, increasing user count, increasing user time on platform, etc. But, I do think that if FB sees (because it will have access to a great deal of analytics) an opportunity to become the “Pangaea” platform for this type of content – or if it becomes this as a natural consequence of Instant Articles, a way to create a Grand Bazaar of sorts, that it will be forced to at least consider closing the loop on the revenues associated.

Obviously there are billions and billions of dollars of revenue and market cap in being participatory in the general content lifecycle. All the company tickers above are evidence of that. But what if FB decides down the road to acquire (and you can substitute plenty of names into these inputs) WIX and HUBS and host the actual web pages that it could then facilitate the distribution process for via HUBS to Instant Articles? I mean, what if?

What if it then creates an incentive for publishers, obviously not the size of its initial launch partners – let’s be realistic about that, to use its platform either by a price point discount, a deeper integration, an expansive analytics set, etc.? What happens to the space then?

The point to be made here is that FB is sticking its figurative toes in a very, very welcoming body of water. I think that this entry could alter the space eventually if it proves to be a swim that FB likes with the winners being whoever FB decides to acquire and the losers being everybody else.

Don’t’ think it could happen? Think the space is too big overall? So did social network competitors.

I continue to recommend FB as a core position long.

Good luck everybody.

Source: Facebook: Content Creation, Content Marketing, GrowthHacking And Inbound Marketing

Disclosure: The author is long FB, MKTO, HUBS. (More…)The author wrote this article themselves, and it expresses their own opinions. The author is not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). The author has no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

Additional disclosure: The author is long GOOG indirectly

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Facebook: Content Creation, Content Marketing, GrowthHacking And Inbound Marketing

Need Help to Convince Your Team to Adopt Inbound Marketing?

If you are a business owner, sales or marketing professional you know the struggle of generating new sales when growing a company. We have all been in a place where we need to sign new clients to keep the business growing. This means delivering more leads into the sales funnel and convert them into long lasting customers.

Throughout your research on how to achieve growth you found Inbound Marketing. It seems to be a technique which is no longer guess work, but data driven. You share it with your team, hoping everyone understands how it helps get more traction. And then, a simple reply kills the drive: “We have always sold like this, it works, it is hard work but it works.”

So how do you convince them that it is not only about hard work, but efficient work? How do you bring the message that marketing and sales have changed and that you could achieve more using Inbound Marketing? As with every sales pitch (because this is a sales pitch to them) the best approach is to be prepared with hard facts, data and a simple plan everyone understands.

Build up context

Review your business goals and results

Write down the business goals your company needs to achieve, and use them to make your case. Your management or team work hard to achieve the traction the company needs and they will favor strategic, documented facts and solutions. Lead generation, client conversion and new sales channels are a priority for business growth.

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Use your sales targets and go back to calculate how sales is performing. The goal is to showcase the current situation and achieve agreement on it, not cast blame or point fingers.

You want to discuss about:

1. What tools do you use in your sales efforts? How about marketing efforts?


2. What are the business goals? Leads, customers, revenue?


3. How much does it cost you to acquire a customer?


4. What are your marketing and sales efforts currently focused on?


5. Divide your customers based on how they were acquired: cold calling, networking, online marketing.


6. How do you find top leads? What is the cost per lead?


7. What is the cost of qualifying a lead?


8. Do you reach your leads at the right time?


9. What is the lead-to-conversion rate?

You want to have numbers ready on: leads generated monthly, leads to customer conversion, time spent on generating new leads, cost of qualifying leads, lead nurturing costs, customer aquisition cost.

Transition to Inbound Numbers

Once you presented the current situation, transition to Inbound Marketing data. The numbers are by now widely available, and can provide a good reference against your current situation. Considering your sales targets and challenges, select the best statistics to make your case. A good way forward is to start with general data and move into specifics. Below a few important stats to consider.

Inbound works for B2B

B2B companies see the same return on investment as B2C companies when it comes to Inbound Marketing. In their annual report, Hubspot shows that the ROI is similar regardless of the type product or service you offer.

A quarter of all B2B Fortune 500 companies are already using marketing automation, along with 76% of the world’s largest SaaS companies, according to Pardot.

Content brings visibility

Creating targeted content supports generating visibility. Blogging is important as it can add up significant traffic advantages. Traffic growth is important especially if content addresses potential customers. According to Hubspot, an average company will see a 45% growth in traffic when increasing total blog articles from 11-20 to 21-50. Remember though that adding more visitors to the website is irrelevant if they are not close to your target market.

Blogs DO generate leads

We know that blogs can generate a high number of leads, but convincing your senior management or team will not be easy. Use Hubspot data that shows B2B companies that blog only 1-2x/month generate 70% more leads than those who don’t blog. Furthermore, companies that increase blogging from 3-5x/month to 6-8x/month almost double their leads.

Your company might already have a blog, but so far no sales results have been achieved by using it. The question you usually receive here is “We have a blog now, how many leads did we generate so far?” There are a few major points you need to consider when answering this question:

• Do we blog regularly? Blogging works if it is maintained frequently and refreshed with relevant topics that address the questions the sales team encounters in the sales process.


• Do we blog about what customers need? Publishing blogs that are not targeted to the Buyer Personas will probably increase traffic, but yield no results.


• Is our blog designed for conversion? Do we use Call-To-Actions? Do you offer content for each step of the Buyer Journey? The blog itself needs to be designed and structured for lead generation. Blog posts are mainly used to generate awareness, and without content for Consideration and Decision stage, the website will not convert visitors into leads.

B2B Decision makers research vendors online

The business world is shifting online, and instead of calling vendors for quotes, decision makers take time to research the possibilities and opportunities available on the market. B2B buyers are 57% through their buying research before first contacting the seller. (Source: Corporate Executive Board).

When looking for a partner or supplier, companies research solutions that could match their needs before connecting with potential suppliers. In large organizations this might be delegated to interns, or juniors, however the decision maker will reach your website if you answer the right questions online and help the researcher do his job thoroughly.

66% of buyers agreed that the winning vendor provided higher-quality content and 63% said the winning vendor’s content was more conducive to building a business case for the purchase. (DemandGen Reports’ 2014 B2B Buyer Behavior Survey)

Increasing lead generation is not only blogging. It requires your team to leverage your website structure as well as social media for improved results. Hubspot identified that companies see a 55% increase in leads from increasing landing pages from 10 to 15 and Demand Gen Report shows that 72% of B2B buyers said they used social media to research the purchase decision in 2014

Marketing Automation supports lead nurturing

Even if you have a healthy lead generation program, you most likely reach to the decision makers at times when it is not convenient for them. They might not be yet at the decision point of a purchase, or they may have just signed with the competition for the next year. Gleanster Research shows that even with a good marketing strategy 50% of leads are qualified but not yet ready to buy.

How do you turn these leads into assets? Lead nurturing is the best solution, and marketing automation is a perfect solution. A good automation strategy can reduce the stress of the marketing and sales team to nurture leads, while increasing efficiency. The Annuitas Group unveiled that businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads.

Case studies

Once you set the context and proved the numbers are there, reinforce it with a case study. You can use the Hubspot case study page and filter for companies similar to yours. Providing a success story from your industry helps your team live the situation rather then see if from outside. Make it easy to relate and they will be more likely to support it. You can check case studies also on InfusionSoft, Act-On or Marketo.

Bring tangible benefits on the table

You presented all about lead generation and sales, so focus on small wins to get your team onboard. Results will convince even the most skeptical in your audience, so now focus on how the team can benefit NOW from adopting a marketing platform and using an Inbound Strategy.

Clear data for management

Senior management likes data and results. An Digital Marketing strategy and a marketing tool like Hubspot gives management clear information about the progress and results.

Educated and qualified sales leads

Lost time with unqualified leads is the main reason your sales team is not effective. You can easily spend all your time engaging with new leads without converting clients. This can happen due to many reasons: they are not ready to buy, cannot afford your service, need a separate feature set, require a different service but do not know it yet, etc. Inbound Marketing helps you qualify leads through offering specific value propositions that appeal to those who are able to become customers.

Insights for Sales people

Tracking emails and website activity will return valuable insights on your visitor and lead base. Using a combination of Sidekick for email tracking and Hubspot’s page view notifications you can build up a history of your visitors and understand their needs. Hubspot themselves are very efficient using this approach as they use it to know when you browse Decision Stage content and immediately call you. That is the perfect moment to make a sale.

Present a game plan

Last, present a simple game plan. If you need to convince your team, show them how to reach there step by step. Set a clear and realistic goal, and map out a plan to achieve it with minimum effort and investment.

Build personas & Map the Buyer Journey. Make sure you know who you address. Use people involved in sales and marketing to build up the persona and journey.

Optimize the website and signup for a marketing platform. You may not want to change the website again, but it will save time and money in the long run if you use a marketing platform. A SEO audit will also be needed to focus your website on your desired keywords and improve organic growth.

Commit to regular blogging of minimum 1x per week. This is really the minimum you can do if you want to achieve results within a 3 to 6 months time frame.

Create content for Consideration and Decision stage. Make sure you have a small Expert brief for example, for the consideration stage, and a case study for the decision phase. This will help you qualify prospects and have a complete digital buyer journey.

Use 1-2 social networks to engage with your audience.

Implement a basic subscriber to lead, lead to qualified lead email conversion program. Use a monthly automated newsletter to deliver updates to your email lists and showcase your Consideration and Decision offers.

When you achieve your goals, you have specific numbers to your business that showcase results and ROI. This will be better than any case study or statistics you can find to make the case for implementing a full Inbound approach for YOUR organization.

Commitment is key

Last but not least, remember it takes 3 to 6 months to produce results depending on your target market so commitment and patience is key.

We will shortly release a presentation that you can use as a launch pad for your internal Inboud Marketing sales pitch. Subscribe to our newsletter and we will let you know when it is available.

Need Help to Convince Your Team to Adopt Inbound Marketing?

Using strategic inbound marketing to drive revenue

The numbers don’t lie when it comes to the power of technology: 89 percent of U.S. Internet users search online before making a purchase decision (even if the purchase is made locally); 93 percent of adult Internet users are on Facebook; and companies that blog (compared with those that don’t) see a 67 percent increase in leads per month.

While business owners today understand that in order to reach their revenue objectives, they have to embrace technology, they’re not always sure how to do so in a cohesive, strategic way.

There’s Facebook, Twitter, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and email marketing, just to name a few. Oftentimes, business owners engage disparate vendors to handle different digital marketing venues and are frustrated when they don’t reach their goals.

That’s where strategic inbound marketing comes in. Whereas outbound marketing (the lion’s share of most company’s marketing budgets) is difficult to measure and historically low yield, inbound marketing is different.

Costs drop dramatically because you are targeting your audience. People are not disrupted by your message because they are looking for it. And — best of all — it’s measurable.

Strategic inbound marketing takes a combination of tools — organic SEO, Pay Per Click, email marketing, blogging and social media — and turns them into a lead generator for your business.

Instead of having five voices all singing a similar song in different keys, you now have a perfectly harmonized choir, and all of their voices are pointed at your demographic.

If you’re considering hiring an outside consultant to implement a strategic inbound marketing plan, business owners should ask the following questions:

 

Do you have real offices and do you answer the telephone?

A design company’s commitment to a brick-and-mortar presence demonstrates a commitment to their business, and having someone answer the phone indicates a desire to serve clients.

 

What results have you seen in the past? May I see some samples?

Beware of novices in the industry. Pick an agency that has tenure and has worked with clients from various industries. Ask for samples of their work and results that their clients have seen.

 

What metrics do you provide and how often do you report?

Let’s be honest. You don’t just want more traffic to your website or more Facebook likes. You want more business and more sales. An agency that focuses on getting you more leads and that brings you clients outperforms agencies who gathered 500 new likes.

Another question is how often do they report to you? Keep them committed and ask to see updates on their results several times a month to ensure there is constant improvement.

 

What is your breadth of skill?

You need more than good blogging skills for a successful inbound marketing campaign. Pick an agency that is a pro at keyword research, social media, search engine optimization, email marketing and that can help you with website design and development.

If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You need someone who can offer a custom solution and can back up their services.

 

Do they offer support services?

Pick a reliable agency that can provide support services and respond quickly every time a problem might arise. Will they respond quickly to your requests for website changes? Do they provide email services? Can they design branded email templates and segment your list of contacts for personalized marketing campaigns?

Your website is the cornerstone of all your inbound marketing activities. A good Web design company will ask potential clients questions like: What are your marketing goals? What types of visitors would you like to have come to your site? What are the pain points or desires of each visitor type and how do you respond to them? What would you like each visitor type to do when they visit your site?

They will then build a site that encourages visitor action by understanding and applying trust building techniques, using content and call outs to create a sense of urgency and implementing layout and design to focus the eye on objectives.

Just remember that strategic inbound marketing is innovative in that it engages people at all stages of the sales cycle. It allows you to track leads, convert those leads into customers, close sales and delight the customer.

Strangers become visitors, who become customers, who become promoters. And that kind of marketing is priceless.

 

Andrew Reilley is the Chief Experience Officer at United WebWorks Inc. He can be reached at andrew@unitedwebworks.com or 912-231-0016.

Using strategic inbound marketing to drive revenue