It's no secret that the key to success in the modern economy is having a strong online presence. But what exactly does that mean? How can you get customers to come to you?
One of the smartest ways to get customers to come to you is through inbound marketing efforts. The problem with these though is that even if you have potential customers coming to you, checking you out, finding you through your inbound marketing efforts, how can you prove it?
You need to address your company’s key performance indicators (KPI). If you’re not sure what inbound marketing KPIs are, or what the most important KPIs are, our agency is here to help you out.
What are Inbound Marketing KPIs?
If you have never heard of this measurement before, then chances are you and your business are seriously missing out. Key Performance Indicators are basically the metric by which your businesses success is measured for a particular activity. So if you're measuring your businesses inbound marketing KPIs then you are measuring how your business is doing in that realm. Simple enough.
What are the most important Inbound Marketing KPIs?
While there is plenty that your business needs to be doing to bring in customers, there may be nothing more important than making sure the key performance is met on your marketing efforts. If you are not meeting your goals with your marketing then why are you spending the money in the first place?
There are four different inbound marketing KPIs that you and your business should be concerned about:
- Outcome-Oriented
- Target based
- Graded
- ROI
Outcome-Oriented
Maybe one of the most inverse seeming of the inbound marketing KPIs which are you and your business should be concerned about is outcome-oriented events. These are things which are related to a particular metric, like customer satisfaction.
You can't say something like "four out of five customers agree" with a straight face without addressing this directly. Your customers need to know who you are, what your product is and why they should go to you and you alone over another competitor.
Of course outcome-oriented results may be a little more difficult to discern because people don't always share their true feelings, but if you have an outsourced agency or an anonymous customer response form you may be more likely to get the true impression of your customers.
Target Based
If you have introduced a target based offer to your customers, you are telling them they have a specific time window in which to get your product or service.
For example, this can be a very effective tool for a jewelry store who is trying to get all of their pre-Valentine's Day sales cut off by February 5th. So if you send out an inbound marketing offer of "X percent off for shoppers between 1/21-2/3 with this coupon" this gives the retailer a clear picture of how this one piece of inbound marketing took their product from overstock to the hands of customers.
Graded
If yours is a rated or graded metric, then you are looking to increase your sales by "X percent." So if you have been trending with a 1 percent gain, quarter over quarter for the last eight quarters but you want to double that, you can use an inbound marketing effort to try and show your successful inbound marketing KPIs.
Just like the target based metric, you can use a specific item in your inbound marketing efforts or have the customers to this specific marketing effort bring in a coupon to show that this increase in percentage was caused by your inbound marketing efforts.
ROI
At the end of the day what is really most important for your inbound marketing KPIs is that you know and are confident with what the return on investment is from using these specific marketing tools.
If you are putting in $20,000 to a six month inbound marketing ramp up and you see only $5,000 in increased sales which are directly related to your efforts, that's not very good. However, if you put in the same amount and see a $50,000 increase in your sales which are directly related to your inbound marketing efforts, then you have achieved a pretty positive return on investment.
Overall, you need to be the one who is in control of the message you are sending out and you need to be as much in control of the traffic coming into your stores and on your websites as possible.
It might be nice to just dream that customers will come waltzing into your shops on a whim or word of mouth; more realistic though is that a concerted effort from your marketing department and educated read of strong inbound marketing KPIs is what will win the day.
You can't be everywhere at once and you can't be a puppeteer over all of your customers all of the time. You can though be as smart as possible in reading and analyzing these marketing metrics so that your next inbound marketing effort can be a ravishing success!
Did you find this post useful? Did we miss anything that is important to you? Let us know in the comments below!