A good chunk of the value of inbound marketing comes from the fact that it’s highly measurable. And with that measurability, you can see what channels/sources are generating the best leads for you.
With any and all things related to the digital realm, I highly encourage you to have Google Analytics set up on your website. This simple system will reap insane amounts of value for you and your organization.
That said, let’s jump into how to analyze what leads inbound marketing can provide you with.
Email Marketing – This tactic is likely one of the most trackable marketing things you can do. Let’s say you send an email to your list of 3,000 and you get an open rate of 30%. That means 900 people saw and read your email. Now let’s assume 4% of those readers clicked through the email and got to your website.
So 36 people have now landed on your website. If you’ve got that landing page set up to convert visitors into leads and you’re tracking that data, you now know how many leads this marketing effort generated for you.
An additional value-add to this channel is that if someone is on your email list, they’re likely to have up to a 150% better conversion rate than a visitor that hit your website through a search engine.
Website – If your website isn’t getting any traffic, then it’s not likely generating any leads for you. However, if you’ve got traffic and your website design is set up to convert that traffic into leads, you can quantify the value of your website.
Typically, websites have conversion rates of about 1% (but they can range from 0.5% to 4%). Let’s say your website has the average conversion rate of 1% and you have 1000 monthly visitors. That means you’d convert 10 of those visitors into leads.
Search Engines – The holy grail of inbound marketing is the #1 or #2 position on Google for key search terms. Now, not all search terms are the same since some are high volume and some are low volume (ie how many folks are “googling” that phrase or term every month).
There are a number of tools that can help you figure out that data (Google’s Keyword Planner in Adwords is a good and free tool).
For our purposes, let’s say you’re targeting a key phrase that has a volume of 10,000 unique searches every month.
The #1 position on Google typically gets 33% of search volume (the #2 position gets about 18%). So if you manage to achieve the #1 position, you’ll drive about 3,300 visitors to your site. If you’re able to convert them to leads at a 1% rate, this source will generate 33 leads for you every month.
Blogging – This marketing tactic is somewhat harder to quantify since it tends to be a much more long-term proposition than most other marketing efforts. Typically the goal here is generating trust & subject matter authority with your visitors.
Another goal with blogging is to drive traffic to your site thanks to posts that get shared on social media and email. It’s best to establish a baseline for the volume a blog drives by recording what your traffic was before you create a blog, and what traffic is after blog creation.
An additional way to establish the value of a blog is to have a relevant call-to-action (CTA) with every post. That could be a newsletter signup form or a way to quickly share the post on social media. With that function, you can track the number of sign up or shares you get from your blog posts.
YouTube/Vimeo Videos – The number of folks watching and streaming videos online has skyrocketed over the past few years. Videos tend to be highly shareable as well, which means they can go “viral” and drive exponential traffic to your site.
Some of the best converting and viral videos are “how to” videos that can actually add value to the watcher’s day. Keep that in mind. Just because you publish a video doesn’t mean people will find value in it.
One of the best ways to figure out how many leads a video generates is to have a CTA during and at the end of the video (i.e. “click here to learn more” or “use offer code ‘X’ to get ‘Y’ special offer”).
There are a number of other inbound marketing tactics and methods that can drive traffic and leads to you, just make sure you evaluate all options with the lens of “what direct impact will this have on my organization?”
Combining multiple marketing methods together in a scalable way means you’ll create a Marketing Machine that runs, hums and generates business for you automatically. It takes work, but it is achievable! If you want more marketing tips and advice for your business, send us an email or sign up for our newsletter below.