Inbound marketing and inbound sales for that matter are 100% metrics driven. While we have creative inputs, strategy conversations, and a lot of content to create this is the first time in my marketing career you can actually see, exactly how your marketing and sales programs are performing in real-time.
This provides you with tremendous power. Stan Lee wrote, with great power also comes great responsibility. So the question we’re going to answer today is what can you do with all this data and how do we empower our teams to use these numbers to get clients better results and help the inbound marketing agency make more money.
Profitability Numbers Control Over Servicing
Inbound marketing engagements offer the opportunity to over service your clients. You’re working hard to get clients’ results and good client services teams sometimes stray from what’s in scope or within budget. This is actually positive but requires controls.
By giving the teams insight into the profitability of engagements you’re giving them the inbound marketing agency numbers so they decide whether extra service is affordable or not. Without this data, you might find your teams driving highly unprofitable inbound engagements.
Getting Teams Closer To Client Data Helps Improve Results
Tom Peters wrote, what gets measured gets done. Give your inbound agency teams guidance around what they should be tracking on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis. If your team doesn’t have inbound marketing experience, and most of them won’t, then it’s going to be up to you to show them how to break down an inbound program and identify the areas that need improvement. Here is an article from April that highlights what inbound marketing agency metrics to watch daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly.
Once you get them focused on the what to watch, next you’re going to have to get them to come up with the right plan that responds to the story the numbers are telling you. Some responses might be obvious, other responses not so obvious. For instance, we’ve found that CTA buttons convert at a 50% higher rate when there’s lead in text associated with the button. I included text like this in the article below right above my CTA button.
It’s going to take time and experience to learn little tricks like this. Make sure someone in the company is responsible for sharing key learnings across all your teams. At the very least, make sure someone is documenting this so you have it and it’s easily accessible. For inbound marketing agencies, this intelligence is a competitive advantage.
Data Across Clients Shows You What Works
As you get more and more inbound engagements under your belt, the more confident you and your team is going to feel about your ability to quickly identify and respond to program challenges. What works for one client might not work for all clients but when you see tactics working and in-program adjustments producing results, you have to work hard to leverage these adjustments across all your clients.
As I mentioned above, taking the key learnings and turning those into standard operating procedure is one of the differences between the best inbound agencies and the rest of the pack. One of the ways we do that is with playbooks. Consider creating playbooks for every single tactic, process and procedure within your agency. Assign someone to “own” their playbook and make sure those playbooks get updated as often as necessary. We make subtle adjustments to almost everything we do on a monthly basis and those playbooks capture all those small tweaks, so everyone knows exactly how to execute.
You don’t have to be a math major to quickly see marketing has changed. These numbers are not about calculations but about seeing what’s working as expected, what’s working below expectations and what might be tanking. Once you get good at finding this and you respond to it quickly with an action plan you’ll start to get a better handle on what makes inbound marketing and inbound sales so different from what we all used to do.
Work closely with your team to expose them to the numbers, guide them on how to respond to the numbers and teach them how to use the services numbers to make sure your profitably servicing all your clients.
Start Today Tip – A lot of marketing people are not numbers people. Today, inbound marketing and inbound sales are all about the numbers, so you need to get your team very comfortable with numbers and what the numbers tell you about your client engagements. One great way to do this is role play and group program evaluations. Consider scheduling weekly Metrics Meetings to work as a team going through the numbers, evaluate what they tell you and brainstorm on potential responses to the numbers. Pretty soon you’ll see them responding productively and driving client results.
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