I do a lot of work with inbound marketing agency owners on their own inbound marketing. We look at their messaging, their differentiation, their websites, their lead nurturing, their content offers and their social media. While most of it is pretty good, there are always recommendations to improve their results.
So the question becomes, how do you know if your own inbound marketing is missing something important? As agency owners you have to be able to evaluate and analyze your own inbound programs and the inbound programs of your clients to identify the weak spots and make the necessary upgrades.
Here’s how you can tell if your own inbound marketing is under performing.
Your Visitor Traffic Is Not Increasing
This might sound obvious, but it’s not. Your website visitor traffic should be increasing month over month. Keep in mind that some months might not come with an increase, especially December and August when typically, CEOs are more worried about vacations and holidays than getting leads for their businesses.
Regardless, if you can’t generate a 10% increase in traffic month over month, you have a deficiency in your own inbound marketing effort. This means you might not be blogging enough. You might be blogging with keywords that are too competitive. Your website might not be architected or built to rank for the right keywords or your website might be missing the pages or the page titles to rank highly on the search engines.
You might not be using all the tools in your tool box. For instance, while organic visitors are key, you're going to want to optimize your own marketing to produce new visitors from social media, referring sites, email marketing and paid ads. Visitor traffic increases the quickest when all these channels are optimized.
You’re Not Getting Enough Leads To Hit Your Sales Goals
We covered visitors but what about leads? Now I sound like a client right? Where are my leads? First, do you know how many leads you need to hit your revenue goals? You need to know this. If this is 15 a week, you’re in a different spot than if it’s 50. Run all your numbers, create your funnel analytics to benchmark today’s performance and create a schematic for the ultimate funnel.
Your lead numbers should be going up too. If website visitors are increasing 10% each month and you’re able to improve your conversion rate by .1% each month (so from .5% to .6% in the first month), the combined effect will improve your lead generation efforts by almost eight times. So if you’re getting five leads a month, in 12 months you’ll be getting 43 leads a month. That’s significant.
Here’s even better news. Run this same set of improvement metrics out into year two and by the end of year two you’re looking at 242 leads each month. That’s game changing.
Your Site Wide Conversion Rate Is Low
I looked at an agency the other day and their site wide conversion rate was around .5%. That’s lower than were it needs to be. Traditionally, data on site wide conversion rates fluctuate between 1% and 3%, but we have some client sites that are 8% and higher.
The minimum level of performance for an agency site should be 1% and it probably should be closer to 2% or higher. If you apply the same slow and up to the right approach we discussed above and each month you improve the conversion rate by .1%, in no time you’ll be generating all the leads you need to hit any of your revenue goals.
Your Visitors Are Not Reading Your Messages
Today’s websites are story oriented and can become long stories from a website perspective. You have to measure your detailed content with your prospect’s desire to digest your content. One way to do that is to track how far they scroll down your site and how much they interact with your conversion points on your site.
Typically, we do that by using Hotjaror Crazyeggto track visitor scroll behavior and visitor click behavior. Both insights let us know where visitors are looking and where they’re clicking. Now we can evaluate how our story is engaging the visitor and at what level of engagement we’re achieving. We then tweak and adjust the story as needed to improve performance of the site.
You’re Not Converting Leads Into Clients
Marketing is designed to produce leads but your company won’t grow if you can’t convert those leads into new clients. If your marketing is working but your sales process isn’t you’ll see a disproportionate number of leads that never turn into new clients. That’s why this number is one that you need to be aware of and track on at least a monthly basis.
Over time as you get better at closing leads you should expect to see this conversion rate increasing just like you’re expecting to see the visitors to leads conversion rate increasing too. If this isn’t improving, try adding some more nurturing into your sales process to help your prospects feel safer hiring your firm.
Inbound marketing takes practice, patience and time. The longer you do it (if you’re doing it correctly) the better the results. Setting performance expectations for your team and pushing them to prioritize the work to deliver on your stated goals is how you help them get better at inbound.
Start Today Tip – There are far too many agency owners who don’t have key performance metrics at their disposal. Website traffic, conversion rate and leads are the easiest of the KPIs for you to have on the tip of your tongue. To improve these three numbers, you need to know them and you need to make it clear with your team that these are to be increased month over month. Because it’s right before a holiday weekend, your homework today simple, get these numbers. To make it easier, just download the HubSpot app to your phone and you’re in business.
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