Inbound marketing has become a popular approach for businesses to attract potential customers and increase brand awareness. However, simply implementing an inbound marketing strategy doesn’t guarantee success. To determine whether your inbound marketing strategy is working, you need to measure its effectiveness.
Measuring the success of inbound marketing involves tracking and analyzing various metrics, such as website traffic, social media engagement, lead generation, and customer acquisition. By monitoring these metrics, you can identify which tactics are working and which ones need improvement. In this blog post, we will explore how to know if your inbound marketing strategy is working and provide some tips on how to measure its success.
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What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is a way for businesses to attract customers by creating helpful and interesting content. It’s different from traditional marketing which interrupts people with ads or calls. Inbound marketing is more focused on building trust and relationships by giving value to customers. Businesses create content like blog posts, videos, social media posts, and e-books that help people with their problems or questions.
They also use digital channels like social media, email, and search engines to get the content in front of people who might be interested. Inbound marketing is a more natural and friendly way to engage with customers. Instead of forcing ads on people, businesses offer something helpful that people actually want to see. Over time, this can create a strong connection with customers that leads to more loyal customers and more sales.
How to figure out if your inbound marketing strategy isn’t working
There are several metrics that you can consider if you have an inkling that your inbound marketing strategy isn’t working and you’d like to know for sure. These are a few that will make it immediately clear that the strategy needs to be improved.
Website traffic isn’t increasing
You’ve been consistently creating new content and posting it on your website. Ideally, you should be seeing an overall increase in website traffic as the content begins ranking higher in search results. Use tools such as Google Analytics to see your traffic stats. If your traffic is the same as it was before you started inbound marketing or even lower, it’s a clear sign that the content isn’t doing what it needs to do in order to bring in more visitors.
Slow lead generation
Perhaps your content is doing what it needs to do and the traffic has increased, however, it has not led to any meaningful improvement in conversions. The ultimate goal here is to increase conversions. This may suggest that either the content isn’t relevant enough or that the hook isn’t enticing enough for people to enter the sales funnel.
Low conversion rate:
Even if the leads are trickling in at the rate that you expected them to, it’s possible that there may be an issue with the overall sales funnel and that would be reflected by a low conversion rate. There’s something that’s happening during the customer journey that’s causing them to leave before they convert into a paying customer.
Tips to improve inbound marketing
- Refine your target audience
You need to revisit how you’ve defined your target audience. Perhaps the content that you’ve created isn’t targeted to the right audience, which is why it’s unable to produce the results that you want it to. Reconsider the audience and understand their interests, needs, and pain points.
Utilize the existing data to develop buyer personas that outline your ideal customer demographic and behavior. This will be the foundation upon which you need to build your entire content marketing strategy. Ensure that the foundation is solid so that those efforts are not made in vain.
- Focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Simply posting good content and hoping that it will get the job done isn’t enough. You need to optimize it for search engines so that when people are searching online they come across your website. This will require the use of relevant keywords, meta descriptions, backlinks, and more.
Make sure that SEO best practices are followed when the content is written. The posts should have a defined outline, relevant headings, and a call to action that addresses whatever question or concern the visitor may have. The call to action is perhaps the most important part of the process as that’s what brings people to your sales funnel.
- Build backlinks from relevant websites
Backlinks are an important SEO tool. They serve as a signal to Google that your content is relevant and that other high-authority sites in the industry link back to it. This can eventually help your content increase its rankings, thereby bringing more visitors to your website.
Avoid paying for backlinks. Focus on creating backlinks through guest postings instead. Reach out to other websites in the industry with interesting and original content that you can post on their websites. The focus should be on building relevant backlinks as those that are from unrelated sites may not achieve the desired result.
- Use social media for retargeting campaigns
It’s important that you target people who have landed on your website but have not made a purchase. Perhaps they’re not fully convinced and just need a bit of a nudge to understand the value that your product or service offers.
Utilize the website traffic data to run retargeting campaigns on social media networks. Create a compelling copy with great creatives that can capture their attention on the social media networks that they use. Use it as an opportunity to reintroduce yourself to them and highlight the benefits of your products and services to bring them back and eventually get a conversion.
- Don’t forget email marketing
Email marketing is an incredibly powerful tool to improve your inbound marketing. Deliver great content through emails to nurture leads and promote your products. Get smarter with email marketing by segmenting the list and personalizing messages to increase engagement and conversions.
Remember that email marketing takes time. It’s wrong to expect immediate results from this strategy. Be consistent with your email marketing efforts and you can expect to see results from it over time.
Inbound marketing is a marathon, not a sprint
It’s important to be mindful of the fact that inbound marketing takes time to deliver the results you want. If you’ve only just started doing it, don’t expect it to bring dozens of new leads overnight. You need to give it time. You just need to be consistent in creating good content that resonates with the audience.
Keep analyzing the performance of your inbound marketing strategy and be open to change as and when required. Follow industry trends and adapt your content accordingly. If the execution is right, inbound marketing will definitely deliver the right results over time.
