6 Critical Steps to Build Revenue From Inbound Marketing – Part 1

We live in a world where there has been a communication explosion. With more that a million words to handle everyday, and an exposure to advertising that bombards us from all directions it is no wonder consumers and customers are looking for more selective alternatives. The greater the communication exposure the more discerning we become. We have to filter and select what we read, listen to, and participate in just to make sense of it all. The more we are communicated at the more selective we become. This simple truth is changing the rules of marketing engagement forever.

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound Marketing strategies are designed to get you found by customers. Inbound Marketing seeks to pull customers towards you, whilst traditional outbound marketing pushes messages and information at targets or prospects, often without their consent. If you like it is interruption based. Inbound marketing is the reverse logic since it is consent based, which in a world of ever increasing communication, turning down or tuning out the sheer communication volume has become necessary for all of us. This is the age of Inbound Marketing, where attraction, consent and influence rule and interruption is just an impolite word.  

STEP 1 – AGREE & SET A REALISTIC GOAL  

Prioritise your success

Goals are about describing what we want to achieve and by when, so it is important in establishing your Inbound Marketing strategy that you first set your ambition in a realistic and measurable framework.  Inbound marketing when executed correctly builds brand loyalty and generates leads, which provides both long term revenue (brand) and short-term revenue (leads) growth.  Winning new customers and greater loyalty are the two main goals you should consider establishing and measuring from the outset. You can achieve this by setting a revenue target connected to 4 key measures of success.

Measure your success

1. Visitors – Clearly driving more people to your site can be an important measure of success to adopt. You should analyse and measure all traffic to your site, which will normally include new visitors, repeat visitors, customers and the number of views.

2. Reach – You also need to understand if you are reaching the right people too. Measuring how many different people visit your website and how many fall into your target group or campaign target group gives you a quality benchmark. A common reach measure is “unique visitors per month”. In effect if you had 50,000 unique visitors per month and 80% of them fell into your target group then your website would reach 40,000 different or unique targets/prospects.

3. Leads – Measuring lead conversion rates is key. Conversion rate is the percentage number of your website visitors who turn into a genuine lead. If you had a website traffic of 200 visitors a day and you generated 10 leads you would have a 5% conversion rate. A genuine lead could be recorded as e mails, online enquiries, phone calls or other forms of customer contact resulting from a web visit.

4. Revenue growth – Keeping interested prospects engaged until they are ready to buy is important as not all leads convert quickly, so you need to measure revenue growth over time related to your investment in Inbound Marketing. Since acquiring new leads via inbound sources have been proven to cost 60% less than outbound you can expect your Inbound Marketing ROI to be significantly higher than your outbound.

Inbound Marketing Calculator

Having the right goals, method and measurements in place it is also important to calculate the effect of your efforts. The inbound marketing calculator as proposed by B2B Inbound & HubSpot allows you to set your monthly revenue goal, determine the number of new customers you need and calculate the number of leads you need to achieve your new customer goal – this is your lead-to-customer conversion rate. In the final step you calculate the number of monthly visitors you require or site traffic to achieve the number of leads you need – this is the visitor-to-lead conversion. The Inbound Marketing calculator is an excellent tool to help you set your goals for your Inbound Marketing campaigns and revenue goals. 

Stay tuned for Part 2…

Learn more about the six key steps you need to take to build your revenue with inbound marketing.

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