Inbound marketing makes use of a variety of marketing channels such as search engine optimisation, email marketing, blogging and social media. Any marketing campaign needs to be monitored for its efficacy, however, each channel operates differently, so there are different metrics for measuring each channel and what it is bringing to your business.
The Definition of a Marketing Channel
“Channel effectiveness” refers to the different lead sources that are bringing visitors and leads to your site.
A lead source includes:
- direct and referrals
- social media
- email marketing
- organic search
When each channel is analysed separately it gives a gauge of how effective a channel is and whether it is yielding worthwhile ROI.
What to Measure
Monthly Goals
Monitor:
- leads
- traffic
- waterfall charts
These are essential to ensuring that you’re on track to meeting your goals for the month. You also need to change your goals each month to know if you’re efforts are actually working. Depending on your goals, you might need to adjust how much content you’re publishing and how often you’re engaging with your audience on social media.
You also need to identify which sources are bringing leads to your site. Is it your blog content, or your YouTube channel? Is your twitter feed driving traffic or is Facebook advertising reaching a new audience?
Knowing how to scale your marketing on different channels is dependant on your understanding where your leads are coming from. However, you need to change the goals regularly to understand your baseline and create a metric to work within.
Percentage of Paid and Organic Leads
This will help you to determine which channel is costing you money, which is costing you time and which is contributing to your ROI.
- A paid lead is any marketing channel that you’ve invested in or spent money on, like a PPC campaign or social media advertising.
- An organic lead is any method that you’ve implemented that cost you nothing but time, like engaging and interacting in social media or regularly producing blog content.
Knowing which channels are driving the greatest number of visitors and converting leads helps businesses to budget and determine overall business goals. For example, knowing that Twitter is driving traffic and Facebook advertising is not, can influence spending, maximise advertising and secure leads.
Close Rate Per Channel
Customer acquisition is the goal of any business. By monitoring marketing channels it is possible to determine exactly what channel is driving those leads to convert, and which channels are getting the most sales and generating the most customers.
A big mistake many businesses make is to assume that the channel that drives the most visitors is the one that’s driving the most conversions. That’s not always true. A lot of channels that drive visitors may not actually drive conversions in comparison with email marketing, for example.
The close rate of each marketing channel informs the quality of leads coming from each channel, which then informs how high-performing channels can be further optimised, and which channels are underperforming.
Using dashboards and aggregated data are the best way to determine the efficacy of a given channel. This data can be mined using tools built into the platform, such as on Facebook or Twitter, it simply requires goal setting and observation to determine if a channel is improving your ROI.
