Chapter 3
In This Chapter
Defining an inbound assessment
Understanding why you should perform an assessment
Establishing a baseline attraction and conversion metrics
Measuring your digital marketing vs. key performance indicators (KPIs)
Performing your own digital assessment
Outsourcing your digital assessment
The first strategic step in implementing inbound marketing at your organization is to understand your current digital marketing position. Your starting point is to perform an inbound marketing assessment (IMA), which is sometimes called a digital marketing audit. An IMA is a well-written, comprehensive overview document that measures your current digital marketing performance versus key performance indicators (KPIs) and your digital marketing goals. These KPIs include metrics such as your attraction factor (that is, your ability to be found online), your ability to engage with your website visitors, connecting your content with your website visitors, and onsite structure facilitating Visitors to Leads conversions.
In this chapter, you learn the importance of beginning your inbound implementation with an assessment. I cover the differences between a website grader and an inbound marketing assessment (IMA). Additionally, you can use this chapter to determine if you should perform an inbound marketing assessment internally or outsource. By asking certain questions about your current state of marketing, you establish a starting baseline from which you may grow. I cover several questions for you to consider when assessing your website and your digital marketing efforts.
An IMA may measure your technical website problems and your digital marketing efforts. It may also evaluate your ability to connect your marketing with sales. A comprehensive IMA includes an executive summary that outlines gaps in your marketing efficiencies, opportunities for online marketing initiatives and roadblocks to successful implementation. Reporting forms vary, but when performed to best practices, your IMA serves as the basis for your strategic marketing plan document. An IMA identifies past marketing tactics that didn’t directly correlate to any marketing success. It also uncovers digital marketing initiative omissions that may have hurt your past performance. Performing an IMA is the map for your marketing plan. When you don't perform an IMA, it's like taking a trip without knowing your final destination. Without it, you’ll move in random directions, and you'll never know if you arrived.
So, before you get too excited about jumping into the tactics of inbound marketing, perform an IMA. Marketers are often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of online marketing options, each with its own trendy approaches and buzzwords, that it's hard to choose which initiatives to implement first. You may be in the same predicament.
When you perform an inbound marketing assessment as your first strategic step, you can share initiatives internally, provide a rationale for your recommendations, and maintain focus on your desired end result. This assessment report can be created internally or outsourced. Regardless of the source, an inbound assessment provides a set of baseline metrics from which you can choose future digital marketing efforts. Measuring your current status provides baseline attraction and conversion factors so you can adjust your digital marketing initiatives faster and gauge your future success. You can also refer to the IMA later to determine whether future ideas make sense to pursue, basing your decisions on facts that support your end objectives, rather than simply following the trendiest initiatives at the time.
Performing an IMA is your strategic starting point. It serves as the foundation for the next step, your strategic inbound plan. In other words, with inbound marketing, you need to learn your starting point before you determine where you’re going. Simply put, you want to start with an inbound assessment because:
The inbound assessment serves as a diagnosis of your current digital assets and initiatives. You can begin by using online tools to diagnose your current state, or you can hire a consultant to create an assessment for you. When performed properly, an IMA identifies gaps between where you are and where you wish to be.
Additionally, an inbound assessment identifies opportunities that can elevate and improve your digital marketing efforts and the resulting outcomes while identifying online problems that need fixing. Lastly, the inbound assessment can help you organize and prioritize your digital initiatives in order to serve as a basis for marketing strategy. Not everything that can be measured should be measured. You'll get brain freeze from data overload.
Some of these questions are relatively easy to answer on your own. Others may require the help of an inbound marketing professional whose experience and access to inbound tools may provide a more in-depth analysis.
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:
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.
Table 3-1 Comparing the assessments of website graders and IMAs
Website Grader |
Inbound Marketing Assessment |
Tactical |
Strategic |
Grades your website |
Grades your digital marketing and your website |
Singular in focus |
Holistic focus |
Reports website statistics |
Reports attraction and conversion statistics |
Focuses on technological metrics |
Focuses on business metrics |
Company-centric (usually) |
Customer-centric |
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.
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:
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!
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:
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:
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:
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
.
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.
Here’s a breakdown of a more comprehensive IMA report:
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):
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.
You have a choice when you assess the current state of your digital marketing. You can perform an internal assessment or you can hire a professional to perform your IMA. I usually recommend retaining an objective outside expert because doing so gives you an alternative perspective, a less biased lens on your digital marketing data. You and your team can use the outside party’s findings to apply solutions and write your own prescriptive strategy. I usually recommend this, as I say, but because marketers often have limited resources, I’m including the necessary information here for you to perform an in-house IMA yourself.
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:
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:
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:
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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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:
Unfortunately, even when you invest money in an IMA there are possible pitfalls. Here are some pitfalls to outsourcing your IMA:
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:
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.