Inbound Marketing - Are you doing it right?

It's no secret that inbound marketing works. Companies that blog get 55% more website visitors than those that don't. 90% of consumers find custom content useful, and 78% believe that organizations providing it are interested in building good relationships with them. The average cost of generating a lead through inbound marketing is 62% less than outbound or traditional marketing.

So, why wouldn't you use your website to its total capacity and make it an inbound marketing machine? Today's buyer consumes information when, where, and how they want, often without speaking to anyone. They want to be educated and not sold to, so your website should be looked at as your 24/7 salesforce available to answer questions and provide valuable information when a prospect visits.

Your customer is on a buying journey, and your job is to guide them along the way. So, take a look at your website and see if you provide helpful, trustworthy content that speaks to humans. Ask yourself:

·??Is my website content updated and practical? (Outdated content can hurt your brand and your SEO opportunities.)

·??Are people finding my website? (Are you attracting visitors or hiding out in the black hole of search engines?)

·??Are people spending time on my website? (Is your content inviting visitors to stay when they arrive?)

·??Do people fill out forms on my site to become leads? (Are you compelling people to take action or take off?)

·??What percentage of my sales are coming from my website? (Are you making money from your website?)

The purpose of a website is to bring in sales. People say, "I just need a placeholder to send people to read about the company, so I don't want to spend a lot on my website." That's like a chef saying, "I want to display my food, but I don't want people to eat it." There is no point in having a website if people don't find it beneficial to their lives. There's even less reason to have one if it's turning away visitors and sending them to your competitor.

If you are not doing it right, Are you even ready to drive more traffic, leads, and sales?

Tracking The Audience

It's easy to go down an inbound marketing rabbit hole with the quantity and accessibility of data available today. A combination of Hubspot and Google Analytics alone can lead to hours of investigation into who is doing what on your site.

Before spending hours or days analyzing every data point, think about the reason behind inbound marketing in the first place, which is to get more leads and sales. By focusing on your end goal, you can spend time on the most critical metrics to your marketing success and avoid getting lost in a data black hole.

You need to make $100k in sales from your website to justify your inbound marketing spend. Each client you bring in is $50k, and you need at least ten sales-qualified leads (SQLs) to close one client. To get those SQLs, you need at least 50 marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

The RIGHT Website Traffic

You can see that the first metric to focus on is site traffic by backing into your end goal. Boosting site traffic through blogging, influencer marketing, and social interaction will get you started in the right direction. An increase in website traffic will improve your number of leads and, ultimately, sales, as long as it's the RIGHT traffic.

Many SEO and marketing companies advise creating constant, low-quality content to get a quick fix on a traffic boost, like ordering content off a fast-food value menu. It might taste good in the short term, but it doesn't provide the nutritional value your website needs.

In reality, an increase in visitors only equates to profit if you get the RIGHT traffic to your site. Here are the sub metrics to review to ensure you are getting the right traffic to meet your goals.

·??Time on page – If the time on page is improving, your content is speaking to your visitors.

·??Pages/Session – If your content is optimized correctly with links and calls to action, it will deliver a great user experience that keeps people engaged.

·??Bounce Rate – Are people finding you in organic search for specific phrases but quickly leaving? If so, it's time to evaluate your SEO strategy to make sure it aligns with getting the right traffic to your site.

Conversion Rate

·??Conversion rate, in simplest terms, is the ratio between the number of visitors to your website and the number of visitors who take some predefined action. The conversion rates to focus on tracking your inbound marketing success are conversions that turn into leads. These can range from:

·??Visitors who provide contact information in exchange for a gated guide or eBook.

·??Visitors who fill out a Request a Consult form.

·??Visitors who go direct to your Contact page ask to speak to a sales rep.

In the example we are working from, you will need 5% of the 1,000 monthly visitors to take action and "convert" into a lead to reach the goal of 50 marketing qualified leads. As you increase the number of conversion opportunities available to visitors, you increase your chances of getting a visitor to take action. Using Hubspot's inbound marketing calculator, you can test out the conversion rate needed to meet your goals.

Quality of Conversion / Close Rate

An increase in leads alone may tell you that you're offering interesting content that people want to learn more about, but it's essential to look deeper and see if those are the people who eventually turn into a client or sales. By looking at your close rate, you have a good sense of the quality of each lead and can identify trends in which content pieces are most valuable and which ones need to be improved or possibly ungated.

While the list of metrics you can report on could fill up a 50-page manual, focusing on these three will deliver the most critical data on who is visiting your site, what actions they take, and what content is most likely to convert visitors to clients so you can meet your inbound marketing goals.

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