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Use Closed Loop Marketing to Prove and Improve Your Effectiveness

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The goal of marketing is to generate revenue, correct? It is relatively easy for the sales department to see how their performance is impacting revenue—just look at their closed sales.

But how does your marketing department prove (and improve) its effectiveness at generating revenue when it is separated from that final step?

The answer is in closed loop marketing, which collects data on specifically how visitors come to your website and what they do there on their way to becoming a customer.

Here is a basic look at how closed loop marketing works.

 

Why use closed loop marketing?

closed loop marketing helps you identify what is working and what isn’t in your own marketing program. While broad-based analytics from Google, HubSpot, and other providers who aggregate data from a wide range of companies and industries provides a guide and general best practices to work from, only closed loop marketing will give you specific metrics from your own company and customers.

When you used closed loop marketing to tie your own customers back to the specific channels and offers that brought them to your website and led them to convert to leads and then to customers, you can use that information to determine where to put your time, energy and marketing budget.

How to use closed loop marketing to compare channels:

How do people come to your site? Through organic search, social media, email blasts?

More importantly, how do customers come to your site? Knowing and understanding not only which channels drive the most traffic, but which channels bring in the visitors who are likely to convert into customers, can help you further improve all of your marketing.

Examine and compare your marketing channels. If social media is bringing a lot of visitors, but few of them convert into leads, try to determine why. Do your social media CTAs not clearly match the offers or landing pages they link to?

Is your email marketing leading to a much higher visit-to-conversion rate? What is different between it and less successful channels? How can you put those positive differences to work in channels with lower conversion rates?

If certain channels have high visitor-to-lead conversion rates, but few of those leads turn into sales, it could be a sign you need to boost your lead nurturing efforts for those channels. Or examine your lead nurturing to ensure you aren’t making these mistakes.

How to use closed loop marketing to compare offers:

Just as you can compare the channels that bring visitors to your site, you can used closed loop marketing to analyze which offers convert the most visitors to leads and most often ultimately result in leads becoming customers.

You may find that some offers are more effective at moving leads down the sales funnel. Those are the ones you will want to use in your lead nurturing efforts.

 

How to use closed loop analytics to back up marketing decisions:

While marketing is part intuition and creativity, your department must still use and show hard facts and results, especially when it’s time to report to the executive suite.

closed loop marketing systems such as HubSpot, which can integrate email marketing, social media, content management, blogging, and automated lead nurturing into a single tool, provide powerful data about the performance of individual marketing tactics.

There are many more details on putting closed loop marketing analytics to work in your marketing department in our ebook Introduction to closed loop Marketing. Download it for more insights, or request a demonstration of HubSpot’s integrated system and see for yourself how it can make gathering and using marketing data simpler.

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