Business Growth Blog

What are you going to measure to know if you’re making progress or not? If you start reading any articles about metrics (inbound marketing metrics that is), they all talk about the same stuff: website traffic, keyword performance, blog views, call-to-action click through rate, visit-to-lead conversion rate, and lead-to-customer conversion rate, just to name a few.

Those metrics are indicators of success, so you need to look at them. But, from a high level, what are 1-2 key business metrics that will make you feel really good about the progress you made this year?

I’m addicted to marketing metrics. Once I complete a marketing activity, like post a blog, launch an email, or promote an ebook, I’m desperate to find out if my efforts are paying off.

Here are 4 marketing metrics that I check daily. I try to only look once per day so I can stay focused on other things, but I often find myself checking them whenever I have a free moment!

A common goal of sales and marketing campaigns is to get people to the website. Analyzing where your website traffic is coming from can provide important insights about how potential customers are responding to your efforts. While you might think that should be a pretty simple measurement to take, it’s not always so black and white.

One of the most critical elements that can impact the effectiveness of your ebook is its visual representation. If it's formatted poorly and looks unprofessionally prepared, it makes you look poor and unprofessional.

The old saying "you can't judge a book by it's cover" may be true, but the reality is that great covers and titles capture people's attention and makes them want to download your ebook.

Investing time and resources in creating in a good graphical representation of your content is critical.

I was watching The Profit the other day, and Marcus Lemonis said something that I also feel strongly about:

“If you don’t know your numbers, you don’t know your business. If you can’t track what’s selling or not selling, you can’t do any forecasting to build inventory. You can’t even monitor trends or customer behavior. You have no shot at success.”

Let's say you have the best website in the world. Great! Now what? The truth is, a website by itself doesn't offer much value. If you aren't doing anything specific to try and get people there, no one is going to see it.

More importantly, if you don't have landing pages (special web pages with forms that people have to fill out to get helpful things like ebooks, tools, templates, demos, etc.), you won't get leads - people will click around your site and then leave without ever engaging with you. And that means that all the time and resources you spent developing the site were for nothing.

Here are 5 ways to drive website traffic and sales leads:

Search engine optimization (SEO) and organic search refers to website visitors that come from doing Google searches (or Bing, Yahoo, etc) to find answers to their questions.

Once they are on the website, you have an opportunity to engage them with content offers they can download by filling out a form on special web pages called landing pages. Once web visitors do that, they become a lead that you can begin nurturing through the sales process.

Using SEO best practices, we were able to not only increase the amount of traffic from organic search for this client, but also quadruple the number of leads generated from this web traffic source in just 8 months.

Blogging and email marketing are increasingly becoming standard practices for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Creating content and sending messages is very easy now-a-days, which puts us in the midst of a never-ending data explosion.

Videos, articles, chats, streams, texts, emails, pictures…With so much content available, people have to pick and choose very carefully what they want to give time to. Only content that is relevant to the issues, thoughts, or concerns a reader has will get noticed, and only content that adds value in some way will get their time.

If you don’t know what marketing activities are getting you the most leads and customers, you could be wasting money on campaigns that aren’t helping you at all.

There’s nothing worse than spending your hard earned money and not getting anything in return!

Here’s a quick video to show you how monitoring your website traffic sources can help you stay focused on marketing activities that get the best return on your investment.

Our client, Jill Konrath, author of two best-selling sales books, Selling to Big Companies and SNAP Selling, started a LinkedIn group called Fresh Sales Strategies back in August of 2008.

Her goal was to develop a community for salespeople to come together to share fresh ideas about what works in today’s selling environment.

When Moon Marketing joined forces with Jill to implement social media strategies in August of 2012, she had about 2500 group members. Not too bad! As part of our strategy development, we evaluated the return on investment in spending time developing an even stronger LinkedIn group. Here is what we discovered: