INBOUND ACCELERATOR

What was your greatest success in 2018? What didn’t work? And how are you going to change your strategy and approach in 2019 to improve on your results?

If you haven’t already taken time to review last year’s results, now is the time to do it, before you get any farther into the new year. Even if you don’t have time for a deep dive into all of the metrics from every content distribution channel, every individual campaign or piece of content, or each press release and bylined article pitched to the media, DO choose a few specific areas to review and analyze.

I’ve said many times that analyzing metrics is how marketers prove and improve: How we prove the value that our marketing strategies bring to the company (in real customers and dollars) and how we improve our strategies on a continual basis.

I’m not the only one saying that.

When it is time to put in your budget request for the upcoming year, and fight for the funding you know your marketing strategy needs, will you have the data to back up your request?

While marketing teams may be convinced of the value of their work, the executive suite may not have the same perspective, and other departments will be vying for the same dollars. That means it is essential for marketers to prove that they are providing a return on investment.

Some see marketing and communications as an art. And it definitely can be: crafting creative text and images that elicit emotion and drive action requires creativity, vision, and an understanding of how words and visual elements work together. That’s the art.

But, it is also a science. Marketing success relies on data, as well. That includes both the data that help tell your brand’s stories (see more on using data in marketing content here: 5 Ways To Use Survey Data) and analyzing your own performance data to find ways to improve future campaigns.

When was the last time you reviewed your blog analytics, or checked on the conversion rates of your top-performing landing pages? How do your numbers match up against your documented goals?

I’ve talked recently about using conversion rates to pinpoint your most effective inbound marketing elements — which offers, landing pages and blog posts most consistently generate new online leads — so let’s continue geeking out about metrics and numbers for just a bit. While I love the creative process of developing marketing strategies and campaign materials, I also love seeing the results in cold, hard data.

While marketing involves a certain level of art, in the creativity needed to develop messaging and craft visual elements, it is in many ways a numbers game.

Those numbers should begin with the goals you set for your marketing, determined by working backward from the needed customers and revenue, through the leads needed to close those sales, to the contacts and web traffic required to generate the necessary number of leads.

If you’ve been reading the Inbound Accelerator the last few weeks, you’ve heard about how important it is to monitor your business blog’s performance in order to stack up actual results against goals, make decisions to improve future performance, and prove the ROI of your inbound marketing efforts.

Measuring blog metrics is an essential task if you want to be able to improve your business blog results and prove the ROI it provides for your marketing strategy. Last week, we covered the first segment of metrics you should be tracking: Traffic.

One of the key steps in any marketing campaign is analysis — reviewing results to find what works, what doesn’t, and how you can improve the next round. Business blogs written to fuel inbound marketing are no different.