Asking the right questions

I strongly advise you to perform a formal IMA for your inbound marketing efforts. Knowing your baseline marketing and conversion metrics and prioritizing your tactics to achieve your objectives will save you time and money down the road. At the very least, ask yourself these questions:

• What are your online business goals and objectives? Are they measurable and are you achieving those goals?
• Is your website built to attract? How many unique website visitors do you attract each month?
• Is your site built to convert prospects into sales?
• What sources contribute to your business getting found online? Do you use tracking URLs for each of your digital attraction methods?
• Do you attract visitors by sharing your content through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social networks?
• Do you invest in paid search, SEO, and content marketing? Do you measure each digital media's contribution to achieving your digital goals?
• On which pages do visitors enter into and exit from your website?
• Do you have a written content strategy shared with others in your organization?
• What keyword research have you performed? How are you applying that keyword research?
• Have you identified your target buyer profiles? Have you created individual personas for those profiles?
• Do you understand and measure your target profile’s purchase path?
• Do you offer content for each step of the customer purchase path?
• How many leads does your website generate each month?
• Does your website include conversion forms that visitors can use to leave email addresses in exchange for content? Do you use landing pages and measure the conversion rates?
• What percentage of your website pages include call-to-action (CTA) buttons and forms?
• How do you follow up with leads your website has generated?
• Do you send a monthly email newsletter?
• Have you created automated email messages, drip campaigns, or workflows?
• Do you use Google Analytics to analyze and report meaningful, actionable data?
• Do you use marketing automation software effectively? Is it connected to any sales customer relationship management (CRM) software?
• Do you perform user testing on a regular basis?

Distinguishing between a website grader assessment and an IMA

Recently, a popular trend is for marketers to grade their websites through various website grader tools. Although it’s not as comprehensive as an IMA, a website grader is a good starting point for assessment because your website functions as the powerful engine behind inbound marketing. Figure 3-1 shows a website grade from HubSpot’s marketing grader (https://marketing.grader.com). A website grader in itself should not, however, be the end game in your baseline assessment.

Your website is only one part of the inbound marketing process, so after you measure the effectiveness of your website as the hub of online connecting, you should look beyond your website to make connections between your efforts to attract and convert. You can do that with an IMA, which should include a diagnostic report of your website performance.

The difference between a website grader and an inbound marketing assessment is a bit like the difference between a written repair estimate for the engine in your car and a certified diagnosis done on your entire automobile. The website grader assesses only your website, whereas the IMA assesses all your inbound marketing efforts. The first gives you valuable and useful information about one part of your vehicle, but the second tells you in-depth information about every aspect of it. For more about this, see Table 3-1.

When your inbound marketing is firing on all cylinders, it can become what I call a Conversion Machine — because a well-designed inbound marketing program acts like a well-oiled machine. A Conversion Machine powers sales through an automated system that attracts visitors to your website and provides a frictionless navigation path for visitors to become leads and eventually to become customers.

This machine is powered by an inbound engine, also known as your properly designed inbound-purposed website. But this machine also consists of other parts, including all of your Internet-related activities, such as blogging, social media, and email marketing. Each of these parts, or input factors, affect your conversion factors in the purchase path. Each of your digital marketing initiatives, offsite and onsite, is a link in your Customer Conversion Chain.

Because all these initiatives are interrelated, each of your digital marketing efforts affect not only each other, but also the end conversion result, which, in most cases, is defined as a sale. Any marketing initiative that causes a positive input factor positively affects the other links in the Customer Conversion Chain as well as the outcome, or end result. Likewise, a marketing initiative that causes a negative input factor negatively affects the other links in the Customer Conversion Chain and the outcome.

When all of these efforts are coordinated and documented within a highly organized and integrated attraction and conversion methodology, the result is your strategic inbound plan. Your IMA is the first part of your strategic plan.

So you can start by looking under your digital hood with a website grading tool. Diagnose your website “engine” because it powers your online activity and is the hub of all the rest of the moving parts. After you've fine-tuned your website, you can look at an IMA performance report. Performing an inbound marketing assessment looks at the engine, too, but it also looks at the transmission, the exhaust, the brakes, the tires … you get the idea. Your IMA is a full-service diagnostic and anyone wishing to build a Conversion Machine needs one.

Using a website grader

Because your website is the engine powering your online attraction and conversion, let’s start there. Before you get into the nuts and bolts of grading your website, ask yourself some higher-level questions like:

• Why do you have a website?
• What is the main interactive function of your website?
• Is your website built to attract?
• Is your website built to convert prospects into sales?
• Are your interactive initiatives connected to your website?
• Does your website encourage revisits and repurchases?

The purpose of a website grader is to let you know how well your website is set up for inbound marketing. It follows that a website grader should be part of any IMA you perform. At the minimum, your website grader should include:

• Onsite website metrics such as:
  • Website traffic
  • Website bounce rate
  • Time spent on site
  • Inbound and links
  • Broken links
  • SEO metrics
• Competitors’ standard website metrics
• Diagnoses of both your website and your existing inbound marketing

At some point, you should also measure your website user flow, and later, when you decide to perform testing, you can measure onsite user experience (UX). If you’re not overwhelmed by the basic reporting outlined here, you can choose to include these analyses as part of your website grader report or IMA. The objective is to identify where you can reduce customer friction. User friction is any impediment to conversions and sales, so it’s key to know where any roadblocks exist on your site that cause visitor bounces, exits, and non-conversions.

Provided you have access to the information, be sure to report conversion factors like the volume of leads generated, the quality of those leads, and the total number of customers generated. This helps facilitate future inbound marketing initiatives. These reports help you create a customer Conversion Machine consisting of your website, your digital marketing efforts to attract visitors, and your conversion and reconversion efforts. A well-designed Conversion Machine helps create a customer for life. And that’s something you and your marketing department can take to the bank!

The components of a basic inbound assessment

Because an IMA provides a deeper, more thorough assessment than a website grader, it is more actionable. It also requires more effort. In addition to grading and analyzing your website, it defines a baseline for most or all of your current digital marketing connected to your website from which you may measure your future inbound marketing success.

An IMA measures your inbound marketing efforts against key performance indicators (KPIs). Your IMA measures differences between inbound marketing strategies and conversion metrics in greater depth so you’ll know where to best focus your inbound marketing activities.

At its core, inbound marketing is about forming connections. An IMA reports how well your marketing connects at multiple levels. This includes:

• Technological connections such as Google Analytics, marketing automation software, and sales CRM connections
• Internal connections such as combined marketing/sales reporting and measurable return-on-investment (ROI) from marketing efforts.
• Consumer connections such as unique visits generated, leads captured, and customers won.

A basic IMA may be performed internally and outlines gaps between how your marketing connects with prospects and customers at each stage of the Purchase Funnel. It measures your strengths and weaknesses in connecting with prospective customers at several points in their purchase path:

• Top-of-funnel gaps — where consumers research
• Middle-of-funnel gaps — where consumers shop
• Bottom-of-funnel gaps — where consumers buy

You can perform a basic IMA yourself; however, a comprehensive IMA performed by a professional provides deeper insight into any inbound marketing performance gaps. Many marketing firms even provide a limited basic IMA for free as an introduction to their more robust IMA paid offering. At any rate, a proper professional IMA provides actionable marketing discoveries, and the resulting recommended marketing tactics may be executed by the firm performing the IMA, by a different marketing firm, or by you.

Many inbound marketing firms also provide an IMA score or grade that includes the following metrics:

• Attraction gaps and recommendations: Are your paid search, Google rankings, and content marketing attracting the ideal prospects?
• Nurturing gaps and recommendations: Is your website organized for easy navigation, providing content that form an inviting, intuitive path to conversion toward a purchase?
• Conversion gaps and recommendations: Does your website have enough onsite and landing page conversion point opportunities?
• Analytics and reconversion gaps and recommendations: Are you effectively measuring inputs that directly and positively affect your ability to create your ultimate end conversion?
• Composite score for four components of inbound marketing: How does your inbound marketing rate compare versus your competitors and against KPIs?

Most organizations don’t have the in-house tools to perform an objective IMA on themselves. So, if you’re considering hiring a professional firm to perform a comprehensive paid IMA, check first to see if that firm will perform a basic free IMA. Even though the results aren’t as comprehensive, you’ll glean useful information while gauging the professionalism of the firm providing the initial IMA. (See Figure 3-2.) A multitude of marketing firms offer this service. The results from even a free IMA require explanation, so there’s usually a 30-minute telephone consultation associated with a free IMA to explain the results. You can find my free IMA that scores your efforts on a 100-point scale here: http://hubs.ly/y0Krhk0.

The components of a comprehensive inbound assessment

An inbound marketing assessment helps you discover gaps between what your website can achieve and your online marketing initiatives. Use your final report as a basis for your inbound marketing strategy and to prioritize objectives. Then you can address and improve your online and inbound marketing efforts.

For a deeper dive into your online marketing efforts, a more comprehensive IMA provides more attraction and conversion metrics, is more detailed in its scope, and investigates more complex factors, connecting your marketing efforts with online business results. A comprehensive inbound marketing assessment measures:

• Your online and business goals
• Your inbound visitor sources
• Your search engine marketing (SEM)
• Your keywords for search engine optimization (SEO)
• Your customer conversion ratios
• Your remarketing efforts
• Your onsite and online marketing gaps
• Your website statistics vs. your competitors’
• Your customer conversion ratios vs. conversion KPIs
• Your email workflow gaps
• Your on-page and blog content
• Your ROI
• Your website user experience flow

Here’s a breakdown of a more comprehensive IMA report:

• Website analytics: Much of the information found in a website grader is reported as one part of the IMA. Here you can get the answers to questions like: What’s your website rank compared to all other websites — and in particular, your competitors. Beyond ranking, what is the relative strength, or “juice” of your site?
• Digital marketing assessment: A digital marketing assessment examines your ability to attract visitors and convert them into leads and customers. A digital marketing assessment does the following:
  • It measures your marketing’s ability to attract.
  • It measures visitor sourcing and charts conversion contribution by attraction type (SEO, content, PPC, blog posts, and so on).
  • It measures user flow, content connections, and your ability to nurture leads.
  • It measures the multiple points of your customer conversion.
  • It looks at your automation, your analytics, and your ability to reconvert customers.
  • It tracks your content inventory by profile and assigns content pieces to a customer’s place in the purchase path (is it educational, engagement-oriented, encouragement-oriented, and so on).
• Keyword research: Keyword research assesses keywords in order to determine their market potential to attract website visitors. By measuring relevant keyword search volume it provides a target list of rankable keyword phrases and including the following data:
  • Which keywords are effective at attracting visitors, leads, and customers
  • Your keywords rank according to search engine results page (SERP) position
  • Your keywords’ industry opportunity and market potential
  • Keyword segmentation (that is, organizing them into subcategories) through association with consumer’s place in the purchase paths (that is, are they researching, shopping, or ready to buy?)
  • Your keyword’s volume and traffic for both your company’s branded (“Coke”) and non-branded (“cola”) search terms
• Conversion metrics: Conversion metrics measure the key points in the customer purchase path, discovering opportunities to increase consumer engagement. This assessment does the following:
  • It measures multiple points of conversion via custom conversion chain or a similar tool.
  • It calculates the number of onsite conversion opportunities.
  • It calculates landing page conversions.
  • It computes the popularity of your downloadable content’s rank by number and percentage of leads captured.
  • It compares your conversion metric ratios against KPIs. (For more on this, see Chapter 22.)
  • It performs conversion gap analysis and recommends action points.
  • It conducts return-on-investment (ROI) and/or return-on-advertising-spend (ROAS) analysis.
• Analytics: The analytics report in a comprehensive IMA evaluates whether you are using analytics and marketing automation software effectively. Data here include the following:
  • A report on your Google Analytics statistics
  • Use and connectivity of marketing automation software and a customer relationship management (CRM) systems for lead and sales data
  • A measure of the efficiencies and prospect reengagement from your automated email campaigns efforts
  • Examines lead quality statistics for future lead classification, and higher lead quality hand-off from marketing to sales
  • Looks at any lead scoring system with recommendations on how to best score prospective customers’ onsite activities.

Measuring customer conversion points

In addition to grading your website, you can assess and analyze consumer conversion points along their path to purchase. There are multiple conversion points in a path; it’s not just the end sale that counts. Each of these steps in the purchase path is a link in a chain (refer back to Chapter 1). From a business metrics perspective, one of the most beneficial evaluations you can make is an analysis of your conversion metrics with respect to conversion KPIs. This includes sequential conversion metrics for each step in the customer purchase path (shown here in sequence):

1. Impressions
2. Click-thru-rates (CTR)-to-visitors ratio
3. Visitors-to-leads ratio
4. Leads-to-marketing-qualified-leads (MQLs) ratio
5. MQLs-to-sales-qualified-leads (SQLs) ratio
6. SQLs-to-presentation (demo, trial, sales meeting, and so on) ratio
7. Presentation-to-customer ratio (close ratio)
8. Customer-to-reconversion ratio

Certainly, additional customized inputs and conversion metrics (such as shopping-cart abandonment for e-commerce) may be measured depending on your business model. The ratios outlined here are the basics and are therefore the ones that serve most organizations well in evaluating their digital marketing efforts and connecting those efforts to sales and ROI. The Customer Conversion Chain and its associated ratio metrics are covered fully in Chapter 22.

The benefits and drawbacks of self-diagnosing

Sometimes it makes sense for you to perform your own IMA. This is usually because of a business’s size or budget limitations. No worries. Your needs are more basic, so you can take an IMA as far as your time and learning ability allow. Self-diagnosing your current digital marketing state is beneficial when:

• You need a quick look at how you’re website is performing.
• You have the technical skills to fix coding and back-end problems.
• You need to determine the extent of any website issues in order to determine if you need help.
• You are a one-person marketing department or you are the owner/manager of a small company.
• You have no budget.
• You want to get the lay of the land before you consider outsourcing a formal paid assessment with a marketing firm or consultant.

Performing an actual website grade is in itself a useful activity and mostly harmless. But it doesn’t take long for many marketers to get in over their heads. Here are some pitfalls about self-diagnosing:

• Your reported results are less objective.
• Your report, other than the automated graders, may be shaded by opinion rather than fact.
• Your organization may not possess the expertise to assess, analyze, and interpret your findings.
• Your discoveries may be discredited by others in the organization who have a different agenda.
• You must be extra cautious to form a conclusion and build the data to support that conclusion.

Self-diagnosing

It’s possible to perform an inbound marketing assessment on your own. Doing so takes a bit more work and, if you’re unfamiliar with inbound marketing in general, there is a high learning curve. At the very least, ask yourself these questions:

• How attractive is your website to a potential customer?
• How does your website measure up to that of your competition?
• What are your conversion rates for visitors, leads, and customers?
• What is your return-on-investment?
• Where are most of your visitors coming from?
• Which social media channel offers you the most traffic?
• Where do most of your contacts come from?
• Which of your website pages are the most influential for lead generation?
• Which pages are the least influential?
• Which email was most successful in your last marketing campaign?
• How much traffic did your website see last month?

Using online tools for self-diagnosis

There are some great tools for self-diagnosing your current state. The following list describes a few. In fact, even if you decide to retain a paid professional, I recommend you start by checking out some of these tools on your own:

• Store Grader (https://ecommerce.shopify.com/grader): If you run and maintain an ecommerce site, Shopify’s Store Grader is a good place to grade your efforts in website usability, site performance, SEO, content marketing, and social marketing. Grade your e-commerce site here.
• Alexa (www.alexa.com): For a quick snapshot of your website performance, go to Alexa and type in your home page URL. The free version provides an estimated ranking for your country and the world based on a couple of factors. (Your ranking is not solely based on traffic.) While Alexa has its limitations, it’s quick and it’s easy and you can delve even deeper with their paid version to achieve more accurate data.
• Moz Rank Tracker (https://moz.com/tools/rank-tracker): Moz has been a leader in SEO initiatives for years and they provide a different look at your website. Moz ranks your site from 0 (no value) to 9.99 (highest value) based primarily on “link juice” — that is, the number of backlinks to your website as well as the quality of those links. Like the Richter scale for earthquakes, the ranking is logarithmic.
• HubSpot Marketing Grader (https://marketing.grader.com): HubSpot’s transition from a website grader to a marketing grader is indicative of the increasing demand for tools to measure more than just a website. HubSpot’s innovative grader runs quickly and provides useful actionable information to help you identify gaps in performance. Marketing Grader includes your Alexa and Moz ranks and much, much more. This tool is comprehensive, offering actionable points that you can begin working on today.
• Nibbler Grader (http://nibbler.silktide.com/): Nibbler has a grader that scores your overall efforts on a ten-point scale, including accessibility, experience, marketing, and technology. Sub-categories are broken down into individual scores, too. Nibbler also looks at social media page connections and grades your mobile site. Like HubSpot’s Marketing Grader, it provides an interesting dashboard, a customized word cloud for your website, and useful, actionable points for you to improve your efforts.
• Woorank Grader (www.woorank.com): Woorank grades your social media, SEO, conversions, and your mobile site. Delivering quick results, Woorank outlines critical areas that need immediate attention and points out the areas where you are performing well. The action points are outlined under each of the initiatives graded with an easy-to-read actionable list.
• Quick Sprout (www.quicksprout.com): Quick Sprout’s website analyzer grades your SEO based on a letter grade (like school) while measuring and displaying your mobile site. The SEO breakdown is quite detailed with easy-to-read tables, clearly displaying your results. Website Analyzer breaks down your factors into High, Medium, and Low priorities so at least you know where to focus on improvements even if you don’t plan on doing the work yourself.
• WRC Validator (https://valaidator.w3.org): The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) developed their Validator that’s geared more toward the Internet-technology set than toward marketers. Although it doesn’t have the fancy dashboards and easy-to-read action points, it does specifically identify potential problems.

The benefits and drawbacks of outsourcing IMAs

Educating yourself by performing some self-diagnosis is generally recommended. Doing so moves your engagement point further along with prospective consultants and helps you make an informed decision as to which IMA provider best suits your needs.

Here are some benefits to hiring a pro to perform your IMA:

• A professional IMA provides an independent, objective analysis.
• Outsourcing saves you time so you can assess more quickly and go to market with your recommended initiatives earlier.
• Sometimes an IMA will support what you know to be true but your message is falling upon deaf ears. In other words, it can serve as an independent proof that positive change needs to occur.
• A true pro provides a written document or playbook, which can be immediately shared, and referenced in the future.
• Reputable marketing firms and consultants provide sound, factual data to enable collective data-driven decision-making.

Unfortunately, even when you invest money in an IMA there are possible pitfalls. Here are some pitfalls to outsourcing your IMA:

• Hiring a pro costs money. Many times it’s an investment of thousands of dollars.
• Usually, the IMA is only the first of a two-step strategic plan and, guess what? Someone has to write the inbound strategic plan, too! Unless you write the strategic plan yourself, that’s an additional investment.
• All IMAs are not created equally. Research your options and choose a provider you feel comfortably matches your needs in a professional manner.
• Some individuals in your company (maybe even you!) value action over planning. That is dangerous! By not immediately “doing” your inbound initiatives you could be derailed by these people before you even get started.

Outsourcing your assessment

Self-diagnosis is a good start to understanding which marketing efforts are contributing to your online success. For smaller companies, an in-house assessment may be all you need; however, such assessments are self-limiting by definition. For a more sophisticated approach to measuring your online marketing efforts and how you can best connect with prospective customers, it may make sense to hire a consultant or marketing firm to perform your inbound marketing assessment.

If you choose to outsource your IMA, make sure you understand up front what your report will cover and how much it will cost. The pricing and associated deliverables vary greatly. My marketing firms have performed IMAs that range from basic $1,500 conversion-chain analyses to $60,000 full-blown enterprise assessments. Chances are, you can outsource your IMA for between $2,000 and $10,000. Plenty of inbound marketing firms and consultants perform IMAs. Many IMAs are a snapshot of what is happening and not how to fix the problems identified. That’s okay, because at this point you’re trying to identify and frame problems, not solve them. Later, you’ll write a strategic inbound plan based on your IMA discoveries — to connect the “why” of your inbound marketing with the “what” and the “how.”

At the least, your paid professional assessor should identify the following:

• Online goals
• Current inbound attraction efforts
• Base keywords for search engine optimization (SEO)
• Current search engine marketing (SEM) metrics
• Current remarketing efforts
• Conversions

It’s fair to expect a paid inbound marketing assessment to include a broader measurement than a website grader. The best IMAs view your website as a hub that connects your online marketing efforts and will report findings based on the dynamic interaction between those efforts and your hub.

A proper inbound marketing assessment is holistic in nature, measuring the purchase path that connects people with your product or service — the Customer Conversion Chain. A professional inbound marketing assessment should reflect the complexity of your prospects’ purchase path by measuring each link, or conversion point in this process. The IMA may report data simply for clarity, but the underlying complexity of interactions require a look at each input and factor that affects your desired outcome. As such, your paid professional IMA should identify where your online marketing efforts are paying off as well as where you’re falling short. After performing your IMA, you will have actionable improvements that can directly affect your inbound marketing’s ability to attract and convert.

So now is the time for action. Take the first steps in elevating your inbound marketing by gauging your baseline metrics through a website grader and IMA.