The objective of any marketing strategy is to generate significant, measurable growth as cheaply as feasible. When decision-makers are scouring for every opportunity to save money, you need to be able to demonstrate how your strategic ideas have brought about real, measurable results.
The upfront cost of an inbound marketing approach is often considerable and time-consuming. If a current (or ineffective) marketing strategy was utilised previously, initial sticker shock may overwhelm what appear to be long-term advantages without a planned measurement plan and goals linked to specific quantifiable company objectives.
The most basic yet essential measure on which the effectiveness of your strategy is judged over time is ROI. Despite the fact that it is a constantly demonstrated consequence of the inbound method, this broad objective cannot tell you how to run your marketing campaign or provide a full picture of success.
Long-Term Investment
The commitment you’ve made to long-term success is an important factor to consider while evaluating the effectiveness of an inbound marketing approach. Although you’ll undoubtedly notice short-term improvements, the objective of an inbound marketing strategy is long-term growth.
It’s a continuing process that must be constantly updated based on your unique business model and buyer persona behaviour. That said, the absence of an immediate, miraculous company change is not evidence of failure.
A measurement strategy is meaningless unless there are agreed-upon success criteria. What aspects of your company influence ROI the most: for example, a particular line of business or cross-selling possibilities with existing customers? Specific, verifiable business objectives should result from this information. Those objectives will serve as a standard against which you’ll assess the success of your efforts.
What to Measure
We’re able to walk backward and identify ideal buyers once we’ve determined measurable business goals. Who are the most qualified, valuable leads, and how might they benefit from your marketing efforts? Developing semi-fictional buyer personas helps marketers get inside the mindset of an ideal buyer. It’s critical to figure out where a significant engagement is most likely. Identifying those crucial interactions and when they happen in the buyer’s journey allows you to figure out what you should track. These encounters are tiny victories that may be used to evaluate the effectiveness of your plan. They’re both opportunities for optimisation and an assessment of how close you are to achieving your financial return objective.
HubSpot analytics lets you track a variety of activities, including the following:
- How many customers opened an email blast
- Form submissions from customers looking for more information
- Number of times an infographic or ebook has been downloaded
- How many daily sessions occurred on your site
- The source by which a viewer came to your site
- Who and how many customers have subscribed to your blog
- Which pages of your site are viewed most frequently
Application
Let’s use the hypothetical restaurant Gabbi’s Pizza as an illustration of how to apply this strategy. Their most popular items are starters, multi-topping pizzas, and beers, which makes them a family-friendly pizza parlour. Wednesdays used to be their slowest night of the week, but a new “Kids Eat Free. Dan the Dad, a 37-year-old executive chef living in Canada, wants to cook for his family on Wednesday but does not want to miss valuable family time with his young children and wife. He typically talks via email and Google for new restaurants. He is more inclined to select a restaurant that has excellent evaluations and promotes family fun.
In order to assess how likely Dan is to convert, we’ll need to see how effective our touchpoints with him are at generating meaningful interactions. HubSpot is used by Gabbi’s marketing team to track email opens and click rates on the call-to-action that redirects visitors to discover more about the weekly discounts. Customers are given a reviews procedure after they have visited the restaurant in order to increase the number of Google business evaluations and collect feedback on where there is room for improvement. These interactions allow us to determine not only how Gabbi’s is doing in developing a long-term relationship with these ideal purchasers but also how close they are to achieving their ultimate goal.
Understanding what influences a revenue stream is the way to achieve a successful marketing plan. Most significantly, a short-term increase in income may appear to be spectacular upfront, but it isn’t likely to create the level of trust and authority with an ideal buyer that will help you develop long-term sustainable growth and success.
