As inbound marketing has turned from a buzzword into a dominant digital strategy, businesses of all sizes are beginning to engage in this ‘pull’ philosophy. And many of them are very good at what they do! Still, as with any business effort, it’s important to monitor your performance to ensure your efforts and budget are as well-spent and beneficial as possible. To make sure you’re getting what you pay for, here are 3 ways to monitor the performance of your inbound marketing efforts.
1) Regular Meetings & Reports
This may seem obvious, but a surprising number of businesses do not hold regular team meetings to stay up to date on the progress, success, and failures of current inbound marketing initiatives. And when they do, the meetings often fail to produce the type of collaboration needed for success.
To make sure everything is going as planned and you are spending your budget as strategically as possible, you should get together with your team at least once a week. Ahead of the meeting, you and/or your team leader should develop an agenda, allowing all parties to prepare for the topics to be discussed.
At these meetings, each team member should develop a comprehensive report of his or her individual responsibilities and their progress. Integrating this reporting into your meetings means you are always up-to-date on current initiatives and the overall success of your marketing efforts.
2) Focusing on the Right Metrics
But enough with the basics of a productive marketing team, to truly monitor your inbound marketing efforts, you should make sure that you focus on the right metrics. For inbound marketing efforts, 3 metrics matter most: web visits, lead conversions, and lead-to-customer yield rate. Using these metrics, you can determine your conversion and yield rates from individual channels, allowing you to analyze exactly how successful your inbound marketing endeavours are.
Most digital marketing channels, from Facebook and Twitter to Google, now allow you to track conversions in their internal analytics. And most inbound marketing and marketing automation solutions track conversions, yield rates, and other inbound-related metrics. In your regular meetings, you should focus on metrics that relate directly to inbound lead generation and lead-to-sales conversions, which help you understand how successful your efforts truly are.
3) Following Through
Finally, you should build in benchmarks throughout your meetings that allow the necessary room for adjustment. Not every effort will be successful and while meetings and reports help you catch the cases in which they are not, your team cannot be too rigid to make those adjustments. Monitoring the success of individual efforts can only be successful if you can actually do something about it; otherwise, you may as well be in the dark about the performance of your inbound marketing efforts.
To be clear, enabling adjustments during meetings does not necessarily mean you should micromanage everything each of your team members does. After all, they are likely experts in their fields, and they are doing their best to help your business succeed. At the same time, if you spot trends (such as Facebook not driving as many leads as Twitter, or certain lead nurturing efforts not working out as planned), you should have a mechanism in place that enables you to work with your team members to ensure you spend your marketing budget to its greatest possible effect. Especially as you first initiate meetings, you may feel resistance from your team members on these adjustment possibilities. But once you have built the necessary trust within these meetings, you can find a middle ground that helps you determine and adjust strategic directions, letting each member do their day-to-day tasks to help you succeed. Your inbound marketing efforts should not be hampered by a nonproductive relationship within your marketing team. By establishing regular meetings and reports that focus on the right metrics, along with a feedback system that enables you to help adjust strategies as necessary, you can ensure that your teamwork results in effective inbound marketing that’s beneficial to everyone involved.
And if you feel that you simply cannot manage all of your inbound marketing efforts or need additional help in tracking the best possible metrics, we’d love to help! Contact us at McAllister Marketing today to learn how we can.