Inbound marketing "best practices" involve
data and analytics. Both words have a tendency to send marketing professionals into the doldrums of despair due to number intimidation.
Does that resonate?
Then it's time to get your head out of the sand and learn how to maximize analytics results from HubSpot. When all's said and done, analytics are a game. Once you learn how to play, you'll be addicted to watching numbers rise and fall, observing which actions caused which shift in the numbers, and tweaking strategies from there.
Our friends at Kissmetrics say analytics are the "red-headed step-child" of online marketing. It's hard not to laugh at the apt comparison. It's not so funny, though, when you read that 97% of inbound marketing campaigns fail without analytics.
Here are 6 ways to use analytics-based, inbound marketing best practices so that doesn't happen to you.
Keywords don't have the same power they used to (meaning keyword stuffing no longer works). That said, organic content with just-right keywords and phrases pertaining to your niche target markets still work SEO wonders.
Organic searches account for roughly 40% of first-time website visits. Aim for that percentage and keep the numbers steadily rising. HubSpot's "Visits/Contacts" data card deserves daily attention. If organic search numbers plateau or dip, go back to the SEO/content drawing board to figure out what's missing.
We can't say enough about nurturing prospects and leads through the mid-funnel sales experience. This is where you're most likely to lose prospects, yet it's where marketing content is the most sparse.
Measure conversion rates from step-to-step using the Marketing Performance block. In addition to learning more about which types of content attract, engage or repel prospects and qualified leads, you'll gain a more objective view of where to round out content. From there, you can craft quality content that nurtures qualified leads to the sweetest landing page they ever met.
Leads are converted on awesome landing pages. If landing pages aren't performing, odds are nothing else is performing well either. Scour landing page metrics, A/B test like crazy and get super-savvy about what prospects want to hear, see and feel in order to convert.
The Sources report is a powerful tool. It gives you a single-shot window of every one of your site visits - divided into seven different categories. It's like a triage assessment of how and where inbound marketing strategies are working for you - as well as where they're lagging.
While occasional dips in a particular category might mean something simple, like you're efforts are focused on a different campaign for the moment, longer-term slumps will inspire you to re-strategize.
Blog performance matters. It tells you which type of content works best and it also allows you to continually promote, share and hyperlink to high-performing posts to better leverage their momentum.
What are all those inbound marketing best practices costing you? If you find the ROI doesn't match projections, start turning best into better. HubSpot generates cost-per-lead reports and other custom reports, such as average deal size, inbound-vs-outbound leads, individual sales rep performance and lead-to-close time. These reports provide specific analytics for marketing and sales teams as they assess the bigger financial picture.
If your company doesn't take HubSpot's metrics and inbound best marketing practices to heart, it will continue limping along, rather than building the durable wings required to take flight and soar.
