At first glance, mentioning that it’s important to analyze your Inbound Marketing results may seem, well, rather redundant. Of course you KNOW that analyzing marketing results is important.
However, unlike some other investments, with Inbound Marketing there are multiple aspects that can and should be analyzed, because they each provide actionable intelligence that can be used to improve current and future campaigns.
Below, we highlight the 4 aspects that are the most important to analyze and learn from:
Top 4 Ways to Analyze Inbound Marketing:
1. Performance Across All KPIs
Analyzing Inbound marketing campaign performance is not simply about seeing which one resulted in the highest number of new customers or sales. Yes, this is an important metric and needs to be part of the equation, but there are many other KPIs (key performance indicators) that need to be analyzed on a campaign-by-campaign basis, including:
- Number of leads generated
- Value/score of leads (high quality vs. low quality leads)
- Lead origin (search, retargeting, referral partner, etc.)
- Destination (web pages, landing pages, etc.)
These are just some of the KPIs that need to be analyzed for each campaign, in order to truly understand and make sense of the results.
2. Benchmarking
Analyzing Inbound Marketing campaign results is also extremely valuable for benchmarking purposes. For example, is a 10% conversion rate “good”? Is 200 new leads “average”? Without benchmarks, it’s impossible to understand what these numbers mean – and whether tactics and strategies need to be emulated or improved.
What’s more, benchmarking isn’t just an internal exercise to evaluate one campaign, or compare two or more campaigns. It’s also about looking at the competition and the overall marketplace, in order to identify industry norms and compare results against prevailing standards.
3. Business Development
Analyzing Inbound Marketing campaigns is an eye-opening way to discover new business opportunities and then adjust campaigns or launch new ones to exploit them.
For example, analysis may reveal that instead of one buyer persona to target through a campaign, there are actually two distinct groups: one that is more motivated by saving money, and another who is more concerned about improving efficiency.
Or, it may be revealed that many prospects are interested in building a relationship, but the “transaction” is coming too soon on their desired customer journey – and as such, it’s vital to provide something that helps them move forward, but without obliging them to commit to a purchase (such as an eBook, demo, or some other offering or asset).
These are just two of many examples of how analyzing your website marketing results can shed light on profitable and exciting new business development opportunities.
4. Lessons Learned
And last but not least, analysis is the only effective way to objectively and fully understand why some results may be underwhelming or disappointing – and then make adjustments going forward.
For example, many businesses launch a sophisticated, dynamic Inbound Marketing campaign, but after an initial flurry of activity, the effort loses momentum as other priorities and tasks command their attention.
A common “casualty” of this downgrade is the blog, which goes from delivering relevant, engaging content on a daily basis, to weekly…and then just “every now and then.” Typically by that time, the blog posts really aren’t worthy of the term. They’re usually just little snippets that are of no interest to customers or Google.
Other lessons learned can involve insights about buyer personas, content offerings, and often the need for a website refresh or overhaul (e.g. make it mobile-friendly, faster loading, better layout, stronger content, etc.).
The Bottom Line
Analyzing Inbound Marketing is essential for success – provided that the exercise goes deeper than the surface, and effectively turns the raw data into accurate, actionable intelligence.
If you’re consistently getting this insight from all of your campaigns, then that’s great – you’re ahead of the curve. Keep it up!
But if you aren’t leveraging this aspect – and as a result, you aren’t getting the full value out of your Inbound Marketing investment – then give us a call today. We’ll work with your business to ensure that ongoing and accurate analysis is a core part of your Inbound Marketing success story.
In the meantime, download our eBook to learn more of the Inbound Marketing best practices that are moving businesses forward.
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