What is Inbound Marketing: The Final Essential Element

It is time to bring the inbound marketing series full-circle and close the loop. This article will discuss the importance and value of inbound marketing analytics. Analytics close the inbound marketing loop, tying all of your efforts together and comparing them to your goals to measure your progress and success.

There are five essential elements for successful inbound marketing:

1. Goal Setting
2. Traffic Generation
3. Conversion
4. Lead Nurturing
5. Analytics

If you subtract analytics from this equation you will not be able to determine which inbound marketing efforts are achieving results and which are eating up your budget but producing poor results. Additionally you will have no insight into your progression toward your goals. Analytics is a vital component of inbound marketing, allowing you to re-prioritize, improve and benchmark your work.

THE BEAUTY OF INBOUND MARKETING

All components of inbound marketing are measurable, making the analytics collection process fairly straightforward and simple. You can see where your traffic and leads are coming from, how they are moving through your site, where they convert into customers and more. This information allows you to see if your efforts and investments are working. If you determine you aren’t getting your desired success you can make a data-driven decision to adjust your efforts and focus where improvement is needed.

If you are presenting to a client, a sales team or upper management you can show them the importance and value in your inbound marketing efforts by tying activities directly to revenue. Marketing budgets and dollar signs are often top priorities for these audiences, so if you can show them success in their language (numbers) you will see the light bulb go on and their support and understanding escalate.

CLOSING THE INBOUND MARKETING LOOP

During the analytics phase you should measure website visitors, leads, customers, conversion rates, benchmarks and content performance. You can then use these analytics to tie your efforts back to your goals to see how you are progressing toward achievement.

The goals you defined in phase one will determine which analytics to measure and focus on. In order to properly measure success you need to have a clear definition of what you are expected to achieve. If you lack goals you will lack guidance and direction. This makes it very difficult to determine what strategies and efforts should be implemented, ultimately making analysis and evaluation impossible.

If your goals revolved around traffic generation you can measure website visitors and those channels through which they found you. If your goal, on the other hand, was to increase the newsletter database, the website visitors analytic won’t be extremely valuable because it doesn’t directly correlate with the database. Although the website visitor analytic will play a small role, you should focus on landing page visitors, conversion rates and increase over time, for example.

STAKING OUT THE COMPETITION

And just as you are doing all of this work for yourself, you should also do it for your competitors. They may have stumbled upon methods that work throughout their process. You can determine their successful methods by observing where they spend their time. Just like you, your competitors will spend the majority of their time on channels and efforts that are working, bringing them closer to reaching their goals. After your competitive analysis you can experiment with their methods to see if you can achieve success and then adjust your efforts based on the results and conclusions you draw.

MARKETING AS A SCIENCE

Marketing is a science and an art, but the analytics phase is largely science. Analyzing the resulting numbers of your efforts can bring sense, structure and logic into the inbound marketing picture. You should hypothesize, test and experiment as you work through the inbound marketing essential elements. Analytics allow you to develop theories and create a proven, working knowledge of what works and what doesn’t work for your situation. Unfortunately, as time goes on things will change so you must continue to hypothesize, experiment and, most importantly, analyze to stay relevant and successful.