Tips For Tracking The Marketing Metrics That Matter Most

You're fairly certain that you've got a handle on this whole inbound marketing thing.

You're posting to your Facebook page once a day. You're blogging 3-5 times per week. You're crafting a bi-weekly email newsletter to delight your existing customer base.

But what do you have to show for it? 

Tracking metrics is critical to the success of your marketing strategy, as it grants you an opportunity to take a step back and decide whether or not your marketing efforts are driving your goals home.

Through this process you will uncover information that you can use to inform your future marketing efforts. Leverage this information to ease your planning process, and make it easy for your business to position themselves in the best possible light. 

Now that we're on the same page about the importance of metrics, it wouldn't hurt to tell you that there are certainly some worth prioritizing over others, and it just so happens that we've detailed them below.

Social Engagement

While your first inclination may be to place a heavy emphasis on your social reach, this is not the only social media metric responsible for your success.

Your social reach measures the scope of your social media diffusion. It is important to have a clear understanding of how big or small the audience for your message is, as it will help you determine what kind and how much content to post. However, you should not base your strategy on reach alone, in fact, contrasting your reach against additional metrics is a great way to gain a more in depth understanding of what's working, and what's not.

When it comes to social media metrics, your business may benefit from taking a closer look at engagement figures like retweets, repins, mentions, likes, and reshares. While you may have a few thousand followers, which ones are actually participating, and how often?

While almost every social platform welcomes different types of engagement. You'll want to make note of the type of content that receives spreads well, for example, a post that receives a lot of retweets and reshares. Additionally, you'll want to which content generates discussion, for example, a post that initiates commenting and replies.

Lead Generation

In terms of lead generation, there are a handful of influential metrics worth monitoring closely. Lead trajectory is a powerful metric that will provide your business with a broad conceptualization of your lead generation progress.

For HubSpot users, this information is easily accessible, as it appears front and center on your dashboard. Understanding how your monthly lead generation measures up to last month's will help you assess what improvements, or alterations you need to make to your strategy. 

This visual "waterfall" can help your business detect the moment that they begin to fall behind last month's results, making it easy to remedy dips before they can snowball into something that has the potential to damage your marketing strategy's success rate. 

Another important lead-related metric you want to prioritize is your lead close rate. 

Your lead close rate measure the average rate in which your leads at any point in time. The goal is to attract quality leads that intend on closing, if you're on the right track your close rate will be high. If your number is looking a little low, this should serve as a reminder that your lead generation strategy needs some tweaking.

Adjusting the information that some of your most popular BOFU forms call for can help to streamline your lead generation process and help you attract the right leads while weeding out some of the not-so-great ones. 

Website Traffic

Does your business have a handle on which sources are generating the most website traffic? If you're not sure, you should consider the importance of monitoring the ROI for each channel you implement. 

The sources tool on HubSpot allows users to visualize the success of each channel in comparison to the others. In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of how your traffic is influenced by the channels in which your business has dedicated the most time and effort to optimizing.

We suggest analyzing the following sources:

• Organic search              
• Referrals 
• Social media 
• Email marketing 
• Paid search 
• Direct traffic 

If you're using the HubSpot software, you will be able to easily identify the following for each source:

• Visits - Number of unique visits during the specified period.
• Visit-to-Contact Conversion - Number of people that became contacts during the specified period as a percentage of total visits for the same period.
• Contacts - Number of contacts either converted from visits or uploaded to your HubSpot during the specified period. A contact is attributed to a particular source based on the source of their first visit to your website.
• Contact-to-Customer Conversion - Contacts that became customers during the specified period as a percentage of visits that occurred during this same time period.
• Customers - Number of leads that became customers during the specified period. A customer is attributed to a particular source based on the source of their first visit to your website. This data is typically populated via your CRM integration or by manually closing leads.
• Visit-to-Customer Conversion - The number of people that became customers during this time frame as a percentage of visits that occurred during this same time period.

(Source: HubSpot)

Customer Loyalty

Word-of-mouth marketing and referrals have the potential to account for a sizable chunk of your business growth, which is why customer loyalty is a metric that matters.

Data from an Internet firm that offered free web hosting to their registered users found that "customers who were acquired using costly, but short-term marketing advertisement and promotions give fewer than half the profits of customers acquired using cheap, but long-term investments in word-of-mouth marketing." (Source: Journal of Retailing)

With this in mind, establishing strong relationships with customers who are willing to put forth referrals and word-of-mouth marketing is extremely important. This type of behavior has the ability to drive results, and improve conversion rates because people love to hear about products and services that can be trusted. 

In addition to monitoring the amount of referrals, and word-of-mouth attention your business is receiving, it can be helpful to rate your existing customers in terms of the likelihood that they would be willing to supply your company with a referral, testimonial, or case study. 

From here your business can come begin to tailor your marketing strategy accordingly to raise these likelihood ratings. 

Businesses who recognize the difference between different types of customer loyalty as well as the potential impact they have on their overall customer experience will benefit from measuring these different methods and adjusting their efforts respectively. 

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