The value proposition behind an inbound marketing campaign is the acquisition of new customers which means new revenue. Along the way to acquiring new customers from your inbound marketing efforts, there are several other important metrics that can be used to measure the success of your efforts.
Number of Website Visitors
When you first launch your company website, you won’t have any visitors so you’ll need to tap into sources of visitors where your target customers are already online. This may include search engines, online directories, blogs, forums, and social media sites.
Having a search-friendly website that is updated regularly will allow you to build out your online presence and provide Google with page inventory that can appear in search results when your target customers are looking for ways in which you can help them. Depending on your industry, this process of increasing traffic via search can take from 3-12 months.
As the number of website visitors builds, the goal is to convert as many as possible to leads through compelling offers, call to action buttons, and landing pages. If the number of visitors is increasing, but the number of leads is not increasing, then this can mean that there is a disconnect between the website visitors and the compelling offers. Without clear feedback on what’s missing from an offer, the next step would be to launch another offer that may be a better fit for your website visitors.
In this scenario, there has been success in increasing the number of website visitors, but there is still a gap between the number of website visitors and the number of leads.
Number of Leads
As the number of leads increases, the goal is then to convert those leads to sales. In industries that have a very short sales cycle, then it makes sense to contact the lead quickly to further assess their needs, and to figure out exactly how you can help. For other industries, that have a longer sales cycle, following up with the lead with an invitation to a webinar or sending an automated email sequence with valuable information can be the next step.
If you find your leads are not converting to customers, then you may want to look at several criteria such as the characteristics of the leads as well as the product and service you’re offering to make sure they are in close enough alignment.
Besides number of new customers, the number of leads and number of website visitors are two important metrics that can be used to measure the success of your inbound marketing program. Making adjustments over time will help ensure that your investment is ultimately converting into new revenue for your company.
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Are there other ways you measure the success of your inbound marketing program?
Free Inbound Marketing Plan Template
Online presence optimization is a key ingredient in your inbound marketing plan. You want to clearly identify your target customers and how they are searching for your services online.
If you don’t have one already, here is a free template that will help you make sure you have clearly identified and aligned your business objectives and marketing activity.
If you want to get visibility of who is visiting rather than just raw stats a service like Jumplead http://www.jumplead.com is worth checking out.
Works well for B2B businesses, it gives you the business names and contact details as well as lead management tools.
Worth checking out!
Sounds like a useful application. I’ll take a look at it.