Inbound Marketing Insights

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in marketing are specific, measurable metrics that help organizations track the effectiveness of their marketing efforts and strategies. They provide insights into how well marketing activities achieve business objectives and can guide decision-making to optimize marketing performance. Here are some common marketing KPIs to track to make sure your marketing program is delivering value:

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): This metric helps you understand how much it costs your business to acquire a new customer. By calculating the total sales and marketing expenses needed to acquire customers over a specific period, you can assess the efficiency of your acquisition efforts.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): CLV measures the total revenue a customer will generate throughout their relationship with your business. Understanding this metric can help you tailor your marketing strategies to maximize customer retention and loyalty.
• Conversion Rate by Channel: By tracking conversion rates across different marketing channels such as social media, email, and paid advertising, you can identify which channels are most effective in driving conversions and allocate your resources accordingly.
• Return on Investment (ROI): ROI measures the profitability of your marketing campaigns by comparing the revenue generated against the costs incurred. This metric is essential for evaluating your marketing efforts' overall success and impact.
• Bounce Rate: This measures the number of people who land on your website and immediately leave after the first-page view. You want this number to decline.
• Desktop vs. Mobile Device Users: This metric gives you a better understanding of the number of users visiting your website on a desktop compared to mobile devices. Remember, you want to design your website and marketing programs to be “mobile-first” since most website traffic comes from mobile devices.
• Competitive Intelligence: Tracking your competitors is critical. However, I often see clients become consumed by this type of reporting. Make sure you understand that all companies are different. The competitors you track should always align with your organization based on company size, the number of employees, industry, and more. You can’t compare yourself with a Fortune 100 company if you are a small business and expect the same results. It’s just not feasible. Track your comparable competitors based on their social reach and the website metrics available to you through competitive intelligence reporting.
• Engagement Metrics: Measures how audiences interact with marketing content, such as likes, shares, comments, and click-through rates (CTR) on social media or email campaigns.
• Brand Awareness: Assess the visibility and recognition of a brand within its target market. This can be measured through surveys, social media mentions, and search volume for branded terms.
• Customer Retention Rate: This is the percentage of existing customers who continue to do business with the company over a specific period. High retention rates indicate strong customer loyalty and satisfaction.

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measure customer satisfaction and loyalty by asking customers how likely they are to recommend the company to others. It's a good indicator of overall customer sentiment.

These metrics are an example of measurements you can track. Again, you don’t want to make analytics an incredibly time-consuming initiative, but something that will provide you with the data you need to make informed marketing decisions quickly. A few of the tools that will help are:

• HubSpot: HubSpot is the world’s only all-in-one business growth platform. Because it includes marketing, sales, and customer service tools, you can track all the metrics discussed in this chapter in one place. This makes your job easier and more efficient than managing several tools for marketing and reporting.
• Google Analytics: You most likely have Google Analytics installed on your website because it is a free website analytics tool. This will give you helpful insight into your high-level web analytics but will not show you new prospect growth or customer data. It’s important to differentiate Google Analytics from an all-in-one platform because Google Analytics only tracks one part of the analytics process by only providing website search and website view information. If you only use Google Analytics, you will need to track your contact and customer conversion rate through a Customer Relationship Management tool.
• Moz: This SEO tool provides enhanced insight into your keyword performance and organic search metrics.
• UberSuggest: This Google Chrome plug-in provides in-depth SEO performance information and keyword metrics.
• RivalIQ: This competitive intelligence tool allows you to analyze your competitor’s keyword and social performance to compare their metrics to yours.
  
  

There are 8,000+ marketing tools on the market, and each tool provides its own level of reporting. Based on your organization’s analytics and reporting needs, I recommend searching third-party review websites that evaluate and rate technology and software tools. This research provides helpful third-party insights and a direct comparison of the many tools on the market.

There is an unlimited number of metrics you could track as part of your marketing and sales process. Start with basic reporting and expand from there based on what you identify as the most meaningful insights for your business. What is important to you may not be as important to another business. Don’t overwhelm yourself with too much data. Give yourself enough information to make meaningful and impactful marketing and sales decisions.

Are you looking for ways to optimize your inbound strategy? The "book "Mastering Inbound Marketing: Your Complete Guide to Building a Results-Driven Inbound Strategy," written by Elyse Flynn Meyer, Owner & Founder of Prism Global Marketing Solutions, covers every aspect of the inbound marketing methodology, including the revenue generation trifecta of marketing, sales, and the customer experience. Check out the book to see how to most efficiently and effectively develop, implement, and maintain your inbound strategy.