Solutions For Measuring Inbound Marketing and ROI
Posted by Stacie Chalmers on Wed, Jul 08, 2009 @ 03:50 PM
It's become evident to me that one of the biggest marketing challenges for business owners is how to measure their inbound marketing and return on investment (ROI).
I've included a link at the bottom of this blog to an excel sheet for Measuring Marketing and ROI which I've adapted from a document received from Hubspot. But before you jump ahead and download the excel sheet, take the time to review my notes on what you should do before starting any marketing and what to measure.
Before You Start
Before starting out with any marketing take the time to plan and set goals. The benefit of doing this is to make sure you get the best return out of your marketing efforts. Often marketers will blame a particular marketing tactic when really it was the message. You need to know what your goals are, who your customers are and what they want, before you even begin an effective marketing campaign.
From here you can craft your marketing message, addressing problems and outcomes that speak to the value system of your prospects. If you have the budget I would suggest speaking with a professional marketing consultant. They will work with you to create a Marketing Plan that will communicate your message (value proposition) to your prospects (target market) via different channels, and develop a lead nurturing program that will attract prospects into your sales funnel, and keep them moving down the funnel until they are ready to convert to a customer.
All your marketing efforts need to be monitored. Test and measure, test and measure and test and measure again, to see what yields the best returns.
What To Measure
There are a lot of different metrics out there but what really matters is what is impacting the bottom line.
Visitors: What's driving traffic (visitors) to your site
Leads: What's encouraging the visitors to convert to a lead.
Customers: What's encouraging the leads to convert to a customer
Personally, I believe Hubspot offers the best tools for monitoring specific marketing campaigns. One of the great features of the Hubspot tools is that it allows you to track specific marketing tactics, even something as simple as a Tweet (ie Tweeted with a link to blog). I find it interesting to see how much extra traffic I get just by changing my status in LinkedIn.
Converting Your Visitors Into Leads
A visitor becomes a lead once they've indicated some interest in your product/service.
Of course traffic on its own doesn't mean much if there are no conversions. This is where a professional marketing consultant can really help. Once you have visitors to your site you need to:
1. Offer the information they are looking for and
2. Give them a compelling reason to provide you with their valuable contact details.
What can you offer that is of value to your prospects? Some suggestions are: Blog subscriptions, eNewsletters, free ebook, free tool or kit. And don't just direct all your traffic to your home page, offer a link to a ‘landing page' which is designed to convert visitors to leads. Without this in place, your marketing efforts will seem futile if no visitors are converting.
Test and measure. Change your offer, heading, message, channel and landing page to see which yields a better result.
Download this Measuring Marketing and ROI excel sheet to track your results, compare and measure against different channels and campaigns.Check out the tools at Hubspot and test drive their 7 day free trial. Remember to start out with a plan and seek professional marketing advice if needed.
I would really like to know if this post provides you with practical solutions to Measuring Marketing and ROI?