Marketing is a necessary component for generating business. Inbound marketing works explicitly to attract customers online, turning online visitors into quality leads so you can convert them into lifelong brand advocates. Your inbound marketing efforts are maximized when you have first built a solid strategy. Your strategy should be a working outline of how to get the most out of your content, advertising and online engagement. We heavily recommend an emphasis on the word “working”  as you will be testing, measuring and improving on this outline.

Each month, quarter, and year you and your team should review the strength of your plan and identify areas of opportunity. With the singular goal of increasing the bottom line your team should decide how to make improvements. Some efforts may be deemed unproductive. This article will review what reports and areas of your strategy typically warrant the most attention.

Review Your Inbound Goals

Before you dive into the analysis of your inbound marketing, your team will want to review your stated goals. It will help set the course of the conversation and become a platform from which you can discuss your progress and direction. Ask yourself questions about meeting goals for both the inbound team and sales team. Outline successes and highlight areas you want to make improvements.

Organic Website Traffic and Leads

Organic traffic refers to those visitors drawn to your business through the organic strength of your content and outside of paid advertising efforts such as Google AdWords campaigns or Facebook ads. Assess social referrals and organic searches. Use your reporting tools to follow your buyer’s journey. Are they turning into quality leads? How are they interacting with your content? Are they utilizing the link building, blogging, and social media efforts to contact you? Whether or not they are directly impacting your bottom line, addressing how they find you will help you improve your strategy. You can tailor your efforts moving forward to include and dismiss avenues that aren’t holding their weight.

In the same vein look at the trends throughout the month. Are you noticing an increase in traffic on particular days over others? How are visitors engaging with your content during the slower periods? Your landing pages, rankings, and inbound leads are good indicators of trends and should be something that you are following.

Assess User Engagement

When you are reviewing your inbound reports, there are a lot of terms that are being thrown around, and it can be hard to decide what is noise and what is going to make improvements to your ROI. Reach is often one of the numbers assessed in a meeting that doesn’t really hold its weight. Reach is merely describing the size of the audience. Reach is often thrown around in social media, but it’s not limited to this platform. We’re talking the size of your email base, Twitters followers, and blog subscribers. If the reach isn’t that important than what is? The engagement. You don’t want to concentrate your efforts on just speaking to your consumers. It needs to be a dialogue. Focus on who is talking with you and about you. Facebook has made this a little easier for businesses with page likes and engagement metrics. It includes the total comments, likes, and answers to questions. Monitoring these features is powerful because it helps you appear on the main news feed organically.

Analyze Your Lead Generation

Content is created on the basis of driving users to your website. When it’s compelling, engaging, and appropriate for your audience, it can have a massive impact on how users perceive your brand and services. Compelling content allows you to become a thought leader and build authority within your market. Your buyer personas will recognize themselves in your message and align with your brand by either purchasing your product or service. Analysis of how users are finding and digesting your content will streamline your efforts. Where do they find your content? Social media? Organic searches?

Content is king, so break this down even further. What type of material is getting the most interaction? Are there commonalities that are being used across the content that is successful? What is the CTA? What type of content is it? Look at the revenue the content is generating and any overlapping themes. Typically speaking, lower priced products and services tend to fair better in inbound. If you notice your applications are producing a lot of smaller purchases, you’re on the right path. Measurements such as these are going to help navigate your landing pages, marketing automation, and paid advertisement.

Additional Conversations

The entire success of your inbound marketing efforts revolves around a successful identification of your buyer persona. But, you don’t want to limit to just the customer making the purchase. Are there others who are joining in the conversation and influencing purchase decisions? Target your marketing towards anyone and anything that is making a positive impact and improving your bottom line is worth your time and attention. Your buyer personas warrant constant review. The needs of your customers will change over time as well as what matters to them most. Update your buyer persona as you go along and challenge yourself to think critically about what it is they need and how you can fulfill the gap.

The Horton Group is here to help you create and implement a solid inbound marketing plan. Learn more about our expertise by visiting our website.