How To Assess Your Inbound Marketing Plan
Inbound marketing has become one of the most efficient ways for marketers to sell online. It is based on developing high-quality content to relevant to the prospective buyers who you can turn into buyers. This kind of marketing allows the user to determine whether the inbound marketing plan is productive or not. Marketing metrics is a part of attraction marketing and your inbound marketing plan is a part of marketing metrics.
For most business firms actual and quantifiable results are more beneficial for better business decision. By using real-time metrics it is easy to identify the best content and customize the conversion tactics for more sales. The following are factors to be considered when measuring the effectiveness of your inbound marketing plan.
The Desired Goals And Objectives
One way to measure the performance of your campaign is listing the organizational goals. Assessing available opportunities as compared to the current number of customers, allows you to ensure both marketing and sales efforts are productive. Some of the real-time metrics that can be used for this step include; the number of conversion produced, where your prospects are in your sales funnel and lastly the number of buyers in your marketing niche. By stacking the results from such a test against the organizational goals will help you know the results of your marketing campaign.
Competitive Benchmarking
At times comparing your inbound marketing techniques to your competitors will allow you to identify the best strategies. By selecting the tactics that your competitors are succeeding at and eliminating those that fail your competitors will help you stay ahead. The first people to use inbound marketing in their industry have the chance to create a benchmark for their competitors. For better access to the progress of your competition, online tools like Google analytics or website grader will give you more information. Some platforms like Hubspot allow the user to see traffic density and the domains linked to your site. Such data will allow you to select the best inbound campaigns.
Social Media
Social media offer a way to get maximum attention to your website. Researching carefully about the target market allows you to know what social media platform get to the best of your customers and prospects. After deciding the best social media platform, you should approach it strategically. You can start by developing a plan on how to release some posts or discussing some topics depending on the content calendar. The idea is to compare the number of conversions each post brings. If one type of content brings more conversions then you should focus on it and eliminate the ones with fewer reads. The concept behind this is to drive conversions to the website from social media community.
Financial Spending
For any inbound marketing campaign, there must be a budget that comes with it. The budget should be based on the organizational goals to be achieved and the time frame. This provides a chance to compare between the marketing campaigns that are currently running. If you have a part of the campaign that has more expenses with fewer leads yet there are other options that are more productive, it will be better to switch and focus on the productive ones. For those campaigns that use more money like free advertising and free samples, you can re-strategize and utilize inbound marketing that has more measurable ROI features.
Develop Your Nurturing Process
Though for most buyers if your products are amazing they will buy immediately but for some a relationship is important. Lead nurturing allows you to focus on the target market and depending on the buyer’s journey it is easy to make your sales funnel a metric. By carefully designing the sales funnel to provide the prospect with motivation to buy and include clear calls to action, this will provide a position of measurement and comparison. If there are certain goals to be achieved linking conversion rates with the number of new customers will give you a clear picture of the growth curve.
Conclusion
Every company has a unique business structure, meaning they have different inbound marketing approaches. The success of a marketing campaign will depend on the contributions of the company sales team, this means you should clearly state your inbound marketing plan and goals to be achieved for better measurements.
The landscape of the Internet is ever changing and Nicole has the energy and aptitude to keep Stevens & Tate Marketing out in front of the pack. She leads an enthusiastic team in strategic planning, development, search engine marketing, online promotions and advertising for the web.
