Top 4 Tools To Measure Inbound Marketing Success

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July 19, 2016

So you’ve figured out who your personas are and you’ve discovered their pain points and goals. You’re providing engaging and useful content that your target market wants. You get prospects’ contact information when they download some select content from your website and you continue to wow them with your expertise as you send them newsletters packed with great information (and more free downloads). But how do you know this is working? Learn what the tools to measure your inbound marketing success. 

4 Tools to Verify that Your Inbound Program is Working

Want a more complete understanding of your marketing success? Use these four tools together to get a handle on ROI for your inbound marketing efforts.

1) A Service Level Agreement (SLA)

When it comes to tracking and measuring marketing and sales performance, key metrics need to be defined. However, in many companies the marketing team has one set of KPIs while the sales department has a different list—and they usually aren’t aligned.

Enter the SLA.

The SLA is a simple agreement (no more than two pages long) created by both teams together that establishes and defines what a qualified lead really looks like. It then sets down what to do with qualified leads, and who will do what.

The SLA has six sections:

  • Sales/marketing goals for the quarter
  • Definition of precisely what a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) is and how to rank it
  • Quarterly goal for MQLs and how they’ll be tracked
  • Description of how leads will be handed off to sales and at what point in the sales funnel
  • Specific actions that the sales team will do when a lead becomes a sales qualified lead
  • Track methods for MQL-to-SQL performance. Review how many MQLs became SQLs, how many MQLs became customers, and which of your inbound campaigns brought the best leads.

2) Hotjar

You’ve invested a lot of money in your website, which is your digital storefront. But many companies don’t understand whether the website is effective at driving leads and sales. Enter Hot Jar.

When you want to know why a page performs well (or doesn’t), HotJar provides excellent information on site visitor behavior. Heatmaps, for example, show where your visitors are clicking on a page, even how far they scroll on the page (if at all). The tool also lets you put polls and surveys together so that your visitors themselves can tell you how to create a better site and user experience.

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3) Google Analytics

Google Analytics can work well with automated marketing systems like HubSpot, allowing each tool to fill in the other’s gaps. Google Analytics lets you create reports that show the different ways your users view your site, and it provides insightful information on SEO analytics.

4) HubSpot

Of course we had to include HubSpot on this list! We’re a HubSpot-Certified Agency because we’re excited about the power of the HubSpot platform to revolutionize a company’s marketing success. HubSpot has terrific tools for competitor research/analytics and keyword research, and it can help you come up with content ideas for your target audience.

HubSpot’s tools can track specific leads and visitors to your site and can identify where they’re coming from (all the way down to the IP address used), allowing you to customize a user’s experience with you, depending where they are in their buyer’s journey.

Need help measuring your marketing success? Give us a call and learn how we can get your marketing data and analytics in shape so you always know what’s working, and what’s not.

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