The historical problem with marketing has been determining its actual return on investment. The old days of print, radio and TV advertising were never that good at showing us if our marketing was working. Now that we have inbound marketing, I will not only show you how inbound marketing analytics demonstrates how your investment is doing, but I will show you exactly how inbound can report on what’s working, what’s not and how to improve it. With 60% of companies now adopting some elements of inbound marketing there is no better time to get started.
When a marketing manager needs to report to their boss on how their marketing is performing, inbound marketing is a dream come true for reporting on what matters. The things that matter most to business owners are how many leads and sales have been generated each month. In this post, with the help of Hubspot, we will show you how inbound marketing analytics can demonstrate exactly how your marketing is performing.
The 12 mile high view of your marketing
Getting an overall view of your marketing can be difficult when you have programs for measuring this, programs for measuring that. The issue is that none of these systems talk to each other or show you the overall performance of your marketing. Take a look at the image below taken from a HubSpot sources report.
By taking a look at the above image you can see a holistic view of all of your marketing channels. Here you can see how many leads, contacts and customers each channel is generating. This is extremely powerful as you can see very quickly what is working and what is not.
Which of your pages and content generates most sales and leads?
Content plays a big part in inbound marketing and being able to see which content is generating leads and sales is valuable. Imagine you are a marketing manager and you want to demonstrate the value of regular blogging. It’s clear to see that companies which have more than 50 pages enjoy 48% more traffic than those who don’t. No wonder blogging is becoming so popular! Take a look at HubSpot’s conversion assist report below.
Here you can quickly see which content is assisting conversions. This information is so helpful at identifying what your most important content is. It’s also a great tool for analysing which of your blog posts are causing conversions and can indicate which blog topics to put more of a focus on.
Which landing pages are working and which are not?
Landing pages are a great way to focus your offers. They are great at helping people to quickly see the benefits, and by optimising these pages you can really see a big increase in leads.
The above picture shows how many views your landing pages are receiving, the submission rates and the percentage of contacts it is acquiring. This tool is excellent at seeing which landing pages are performing the best. It will also quickly show you which pages need improving.
You can even perform split testing of your landing pages to test page titles, images and content style to see which version performs best.
Driving visitors to your landing pages
A call-to-action is like a little advert that is placed, usually at the end, on a blog post and on your main website pages. It is used to entice your potential customers to download helpful information. These calls-to-actions need to be optimised and continually improved.
By using HubSpot’s calls-to-action tool you can quickly see the conversion rates of each CTA (call to action). You can even analyse the CTA’s on each page.
Turning leads into sales
By using the power of lead nurturing you can turn your leads into sales but again trying to analyse which emails are getting opened or ignored can be difficult. If you wanted to see which steps in your lead nurturing programme may not be effective you could use HubSpot’s workflow report. These reports can quickly show which emails are working and which are not. You can then change the emails which have poor performance.
Conclusion
These are just some of the many reports that are available in HubSpot and tools like it. Marketing can be hard to justify its spend and in these tough economic times never before has it been more important to justify. With inbound marketing analytics and the various reports that can be found in HubSpot you can make more intelligent marketing decisions and really see what works.
No longer do you need to say “I know half of my marketing is working, but I don’t know which half.”
Now it’s your turn
What are the biggest analytics challenges your business faces? Let us know in the comments below.