Beginners_Guide_To_Inbound_Marketing

Beginner’s eBook
to
Inbound Marketing

Beginner’s Guide To Inbound Marketing 1
Introduction
There’s a lot of buzz concerning the terminologies and meaning of inbound marketing and content marketing
(arguably a subset of inbound marketing) these days. The latest State of Inbound Marketing report from
Hubspot show that around 80% of companies are doing inbound marketing. This is true both for companies in
North America and Europe. Companies that practice inbound are enjoying increased year-over-year ROI, as
well as a more controlled lead generation process, and increased thought-leadership.
But what exactly is inbound marketing, and how does it work? In this extensive eBook you will learn exactly
what components are needed for a working inbound marketing strategy - everything from defining your target
audience through Buyer Personas, guiding them through their buying process, also known for buyer’s journey,
to working with content and SEO.
About Doidea
Doidea is a Stockholm-based agency specialized in inbound marketing. Starting as an agency specialized in
CRM implementation and guidance the move over to inbound became natural, as serving specific people in
your customer database with the right content at the right time is critical in a working inbound strategy.
Doidea is a certified partner to Hubspot, and helps companies, from small-, mid-size, and enterprise, in
implementing a working inbound strategy to capture more and better leads and smarter sales cycles.
Serve your online audience. build a successful and targeted lead nurture campaigns with emphasis on goals,
teamwork and business opportunities.
Table of Contents


This is Inbound Marketing
Buyer Personas
Buyers Journey
Content (& SEO)
Stop thinking “Me”, start thinking “Them”
Getting higher up on Google
Goals
Frightened of being scrutinized
Wish Lists ≠ Goals
S.M.A.R.T. Goals
Understanding Marketing Metrics
Correlation ≠ Causation
Look at what you need, have the rest stand-by
Vanity vs. Actionable Metrics
Some Best Practice Metrics To Track
Conversion rate
So what should I be tracking?
Website metrics to look at
Site pages
Blog
Email
Social media
Set up an Inbound Marketing Team
Bring in the rest of the organization
Conclusion

This is Inbound Marketing
Along with the change of shopping preferences and the
way we seek information online today, it has forced a
changed in the way we communicate with prospects.
Where we used to be able to attract potential customers
purely by pushing product specific information or having a
sales generalist pick up the phone and make a cold call,
we want to do research ourselves before even being
contacted. We’re also sensitive to marketing that is overly
product centric. We want to understand values based on
why and what's in it for me.
The change we experience today within online
communication is going through such a significant
change it has been called a paradigm shift, going from
outbound to inbound. The inbound marketing methodology is centered around your ability to connect with your
potential buyer at the right time, understanding its pains and be the one pushing through the mass of noise
showing how your company can best serve the customer in order to help him/her overcome its challenges and
ultimately help them become more efficient.
“
Once you know your audience you can create content that
essentially works as one big magnet, drawing people to your site
where you can move them along their buying cycle.
”
Inbound marketing is the process where one use content as a tool to attract and nurture potential buyers online
when they search on their pains and problems. To do this you need a clear understanding of your audience and
buyers, which can be achieved by setting up clear Buyer Personas where you pinpoint exactly what kind of
problems or solutions they are searching for. Once you know your audience you can create content that
essentially works as one big magnet, drawing people to your site where you can move them along their buying
cycle. The cost-per-lead has shown to be significantly lower for inbound leads vs. outbound leads. Nurtured
leads have a 23% shorter sales cycle, according to Hubspot, the number one leading marketing and sales
platform.

Buyer Personas
Understanding your target audience is the
foundation of any successful marketing strategy and
campaign. The same goes for a successful inbound
strategy. Most marketing failures are usually the
symptoms of misdiagnosed customer insights. If
you're chasing after the wrong audience, or not
talking to them on their terms, you can't create
marketing campaigns which brings value and
resonates with them.
Buyer Personas are fictional representations of a
groups of people that are deemed to be your
optimal customers.
There are several versions of Buyer Personas out there, and not all of them have the same elements included.
But generally speaking a well defined Buyer Persona for a digital marketing strategy could include:
● Name
● Picture
● Demographic information
● Challenges
● Pains
● Priorities
● Common objections
● Social networks
● Search behavior and keywords
● How your company answers their challenges, pains, and common objections
Buyer Personas are sometimes seen as tool exclusive to the marketing department. This is a misconception, as
having a unified definition of your target audience across all business areas within your organisation is critical.
By using the same definition internally across all departments - marketing, sales, product development, and
support - you decrease the risk of misunderstandings, have a clearer understanding of cross-departmental
goals, and present a more unified communication in everything you do.

Also, by internally talking about a specific person, e.g. "Mary Johnson", instead of groups of people, e.g.
"software developers who use open-source", you get a more personal and human approach in reaching your
target audience that resonates better.

Buyers Journey
Understanding the maturity of your visitors and leads is critical in targeting them with relevant and interesting
content. Different stages of the buying process requires different types of content and marketing campaigns. A
recent preference study from IBM showed that 97% of cold calls are ineffective.
Inbound is about making sure you deliver the right content, at the right time, to the right people.
Simplified, the Buyer's Journey can be split up into Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.
At the Awarenessstage, a potential customer is doing educational research to better understand a problem or
symptom they are having.
In the Considerationstage, they have a clearer understanding of their problem and symptoms and are actively
looking for information regarding what options they have to solve it.
Finally, in the Decisionstage, the potential customer have decided on an alternative for remediating their
problem or symptoms, and are looking for products and vendors.
Research shows that B2B Buyers are on average 57% through their buying research before contacting the
seller (Corporate Executive Board). Match that with the fact that businesses who blog see a 70% increase in
leads (Hubspot), and those who use marketing automation to nurture them see a 451% increase in qualified
leads (The Annuitas Group).
This is because 50% of leads are qualified but not yet ready to talk (Gleanster Research).

If you have content at all stages of the Buyer's Journey you can more efficiently lead a potential customer
through their buying process by offering content relevant to their current stage, through lead nurturing, as well
as presenting a path forward through new content.
This results in more educated and qualified leads which, in turn, means a higher close rate for your sales team.
Research show that nurtured leads have a 20% higher close rate (DemandGen Report) and make 47% larger
purchases (The Annuitas Group).
Several companies struggle with creating content that is overly product-oriented. Understandably, years of
doing marketing the traditional way means they have gotten used to focusing on themselves and their products.
However, as you saw in the breakdown of the Buyer’s Journey, this type of content shouldn’t come into play
until the final Decision stage. Up until then the reader has little interest in knowing about your product or
company. First and foremost, they’re focused on understanding the problem they experiencing and what the
alternatives for solving it are. We’ll cover this more in-depth in the next section - Content (& SEO).
Handing leads over to sales
There are a lot of classifications floating around for the maturity of a lead. Generally we talk about MQL, SAL,
and SQL:
MQLis a Marketing Qualified Lead, meaning that a lead has been qualified by the marketing department to be
ready for hand-off to sales. This is usually done through an automated process using lead scoring. When a lead
reaches a certain score, based on specific triggers like reading a certain type of content, these can be handed
off to sales.
SALis a Sales Accepted Lead, simply meaning that the MQL has been accepted by the sales team for
follow-up action (i.e. contacting them).
SQLmeans that it is a Sales Qualifed Lead. The sales team has explored the contact and decided whether or
not it is worthwhile to continue working the lead.
The more aligned MQLs and SALs are, the more streamlined your lead gen will be. By delivering leads with
enough data, showing enough purchasing intent, sales can more easily work the leads. Several companies are
moving away from using the terminology MQL and just using SAL, in an effort to better align marketing efforts
with the needs of the sales team.
What’s worthwhile to keep in mind is that there’s little ROI in reaching out to leads that are not yet qualified.
This might feel unnatural for a sales team eager to jump on any phone number or email that comes in. However,
reaching out to a lead who is not yet ready for a sales call, who haven’t gone through the entire Buyer’s
Journey, can be counterproductive. The sales process will be elongated, since the lead might not fully

understand their needs yet. Also, being contacted by a sales representative simply because you’re were
browsing for content and downloaded an eBook can be a negative experience, destroying any opportunity of a
future sale.
Content (& SEO)
Content is the glue that holds your entire inbound
marketing strategy together. It’s what draws people to your
site, and it is also what you use to convert people from
visitors to actual leads - putting a name, email, phone
number etc. on that visitor.
As you should now be fully aware of, a person looks for
different types of content depending of how far in the
Buyer’s Journey they’ve gone. A person just starting the
journey needs content that let them better understand
what the problem they’re having is. As they move further
along the Buyer’s Journey, you want to talk about how
they solve their problem, and eventually why youoffer the
best solution serving their needs and help them master
their problems.
Stop thinking “Me”, start thinking “Them”
What most companies struggle with is pivoting their marketing communication to being less product-oriented to
becoming more solutions-oriented. This is however arguably one of the most important components of a
successful inbound strategy.
Why is it? Well if you break it down it’s actually very logical. Thinking from your own experience, what do you
when you’re experiencing a problem or pain and looking for a way to solve it? You’d probably Google (or Bing,
if you’re into that) it. Traffic from search engines is, or at least should be, where a lot of your companies visitors
come from.

And what is it you put into that ever-important search bar? Let’s say that a developer is looking for how to
deploy his/her web app to be able to test how it looks and functions live. This is the optimal visitors for a
company like Heroku, that offers just that kind of service.
Which of the two examples on the next page seems most realistic for that developer:
The answer is obviously the first example. Yes, there will be people coming to your site by searching for the
name of your product of company (in this case: Heroku). These are called “branded searches” and will probably
even be the lions share of the organic traffic you get.
However, there’s no point in putting too much energy in getting these people to your site. They already know
your product, they’ve probably already visited your page before, they might even already be customers or
users. It’s simply not a viable strategy to effectively grow the amount of new people you’re reaching.
If you instead focus on the that first search term, there’s a lot more potential. This is a user who probably isn’t

aware of Heroku’s product offering, but a person which probably fits one of their Buyer Personas like a glove.
It’s up to you to help them find what they are looking for.
If that developer would find content that guides them through the process of deploying a web app live - what
should you think about, what are usual pitfalls, how does it work? - that is content that is extremely relevant to
that user.
If this content was available as an informative article on Heroku’s website, and that it showed up somewhat
early in the search engine results page (SERP) there’s a high likelyhood that the developer will both click the link
and read the article. From there, Heroku could offer more content that talks about what the different alternatives
for deploying his web app are, and eventually an opportunity to try out Heroku’s service.
“
they offered all this content to me free of charge, and it feels like they
really know what they’re doing. I trust them and feel it worthwhile to
give away my information in return for their offers and would like to try
out their product ”
Not only will this developer be more informed about what it is he wants to achieve, which means that he will use
Heroku’s service better increasing the likelihood of conversion to a paying customer. He will also feel more
invested in Heroku’s brand - “they offered all this content to me free of charge, and it feels like they really know
what they’re doing. I trust them and feel it worthwhile to give away my information in return for their offers and
would like to try out their product”. For this reason it is important that you have content that really talks to your
Buyer Personas challenges and pains, and that it is presented to them when they search online.
If all the content on your website is centered around your products, services, and company you’re missing out
on a lot of visitors and potential conversions into customers from people who simply aren’t looking for that type
of content at that stage.
Getting higher up on Google
So now that you know that it’s important that you have the right type of content towards your Buyer Personas,
you should also understand that it is equally important that it shows up when they search online. To do this we
need to understand, at least at a basic level, how search engines rank searches.
We will not be going into detail about what makes a post rank high for certain keywords instead of others. For
that it is sufficient to understand that search engines (read: Google) is smart enough to be able to figure out
what topics your content covers. This is done by looking at what words show up often in your content (called
keyword density), where it shows up (headers will show that it’s more important), whether or not people that
navigate to your site from a certain keyword search stay and read your article or if they return to Google quickly,
plus several other factors. If you’re interested in reading more about this we’d recommend Googling for

something along the lines of “What affects Google page rank”, and you should be able to find some articles.
Just note that the algorithm Google uses to determine the so-called “page rank” isn’t public, so while some
factors are even verified by Google, others are pure speculation.
Most of the above is just hygien. You make sure your website is set up correctly, from an SEO-perspective, and
then make sure your content is relevant and interesting to the reader. What’s more interesting to talk about is
how search volume and the amount of competing content affects both position on the SERP and visitor
behavior. This can be explained best using what is usually called “The Long Tail”, coined by Wired’s the
editor-in-chief Chris Anderson back in 2004.
The long tail can be explained as the statistical phenomenon that showcase how search volume interplays with
competing content and probability of converting (e.g. buying your product). See the example below.
What this shows is that there is much more competition on the SERP for shorter keywords, called the Short
Tail. If you search for solely the keyword “Marathon” you will get a plethora of results - everything from different

races, runners, training programs, nutrition plans, to movie marathons or even the city of Marathon in Greece. If
you have a business that sells personalized training plans for marathons it is extremely difficult to rank high up
on the SERP for these keywords. There is simply too much competition, both from other businesses that offer
similar products and content but also content that isn’t even relevant to the type of visitor you’re looking for. If
you also would like to inject some PPC to drive traffic from these keywords they are usually very pricey - again
because there are a lot of other websites bidding for them.
The Long Tail is the searches for keywords which are longer and more specific. These keywords do not have
the same amount of search volume are the short tail, but since the searches are more precise there is much
less competition. In the above example the long tail search has immediately removed the chance of results
pertaining to different races, runners, movie marathons, and the city of Marathon showing up on the SERP.
Also, since the keywords are much for descriptive and precise it also means that the searcher has a better
understanding of what it is he or she is looking for, compared to something using short tail keywords. This has
a positive effect on the probability of converting (e.g. buying a training programme) once they reach their site.
“
Leveraging the long tail in your content strategy is great to both keep
your costs down, and increasing the conversion rate on your site.
”
Leveraging the long tail in your content strategy is great to both keep your costs down, and increasing the
conversion rate on your site. If you understand your target audience’s challenges and pains you can more easily
figure out what type of long tail keywords they’re using. Unless your website has a very high page rank you
won’t be able to just publish one or two pages that generate a lot of traffic, but instead you need to publish
several articles which all act as an entry point to your website for different long tails keywords. Find out what
some common challenges and questions a person training for a marathon might have, and create content
targeted at those specific areas. Then once they’re on your site you can move them along their Buyer’s Journey
to eventually understand why your training programmes are good solutions to their challenges and questions.

Goals
If you don’t have clear goals for what it is you want to achieve
with your marketing strategy or a specific marketing
campaign its impossible to figure out whether or not you
succeeded or failed. You would think that it shouldn’t be
necessary to talk about the importance of setting up
well-defined goals, especially since most things are very
trackable in the online world. However, it’s evident from the
clients we work with that there are a lot of companies out
there that do not track their marketing efforts towards
well-defined goals, or even goals in general. There are several
reasons for this.
Frightened of being scrutinized
One reason, that we will definitely step on a few toes when we talk about, is the fright of not being able to show
positive results. Marketing departments, especially those used to metrics from the more traditional media, could
easily take credit for any positive outcome in the business. If you’re metrics don’t have clear causality with the
results it’s easy to say that a boost in sales was solely due to the new marketing campaign. While that
campaign might have affected and correlated with sales, there’s no explanation as to what extent.
As their marketing efforts moved more towards online things became more trackable. You can easily see
exactly where people came from, if/how much they cost to acquire, what they are doing at your site, and
whether or not they converted. This could seem scary for a department not used to it. Suddenly the rest of the
organization might start calling them out on how their marketing efforts perform. If you’re not fully confident in
either online marketing or your own performance, it’s much easier to simply deflect the question all together
and continue working with goals and metrics that have poor causality.
A more traditional marketing approach usually requires a large up-front cost in terms of purchasing media,
allocating man-power, and pushes towards a final “launch date” for a campaign. It isn’t a very iterative process,
but instead rather waterfall-oriented. Once a step, like purchasing media, is completed it’s hard to revisit it.
Online marketing, on the other hand, is much more supportive of an iterative and agile process, especially if
you’re working with inbound marketing. The up-front cost is low-to-non-existant, and the time-to-delivery is
much shorter. It allows for a much for trial-and-error based approach - throw it on the wall and see if it sticks.

Worst case is that it doesn’t work which usually simply means that nobody saw your campaign or read your
content, at very little cost internally.
Here’s where well-defined goals and metrics really can help you. If you’re inbound campaign or content didn’t
reach your goals, like an amount of visits and conversions, you can simply discard it wholly and try something
new. Or perhaps you can look at if there were certain goals that were achieved, like social shares, and see if
there’s a way to tweak it to fulfill the other goals as well. Well defined goals and metrics is a way in which you’re
marketing department can hone their skills in reaching your target audience, and figure out exactly where you
should be spending your time and money. If you feel frightened of letting people see your failures you need to
understand that a marketing failure doesn’t bear the same weight as it used to. Instead failures can instead be a
strategy to figure out exactly what works and what doesn’t, you don’t need to hit the bulls-eye for every
campaign. Instead forget your ego and see it as an a positive outcome that you now know more about what
works for your specific audience.
Wish Lists ≠ Goals
Another reason for not having goals is that several companies misunderstand what correctly set goals actually
look like. They instead define what could best be described as as “wish list” instead. An “updated website” or
“implementing a content strategy” are not goals, they are simply means to an end. Why do you want to
redesign your website or implement a content strategy? In the answer to that question lies your goals. You’re
redesigning your website because metrics show that your conversion rate is below industry standards, or that a
lot of people are abandoning your online shopping cart. You want to implement a content strategy because you
want to generate a more leads, or get more customers.
You can’t reasonably expect a website redesign to achieve your goals if you don’t define them. Whilst a
redesign might help you increase the conversion of your current visitors and improve your SEO, it’s highly
unlikely that this step alone will drive more traffic to your site, which could be what your company really needs.
Defining these goals ahead of time makes sure you are trying things for the right reason.
S.M.A.R.T. Goals
You might already have heard this acronym. S.M.A.R.T. Goals, which we will cover below, is actually an
excellent way to formulate goals that make sense. Some people are put off by the amount of work needed in
defining S.M.A.R.T. goals but there a reason why it has become somewhat of a standard. If all the pieces of
your goal aren’t there, is much harder to track your efforts towards them.

The components of a S.M.A.R.T. goal are:
S - Specific
Understanding that a website rehaul isn’t your goal, but rather to increase conversion rate, is a good start.
However, you won’t really know when you’ve achieved it unless you define how much. Getting your conversion
rate up from 5% to 10% is a specific goal.
M - Measurable
You also need to make sure that you actually have metrics to be able to measure towards the goal. In our
example, you need to make sure everyone knows what exactly counts as a conversion. It could be filling out a
form, or purchasing a product online.
A - Attainable
Making sure you’re goals are actually attainable is the next step. Is increasing your conversion rate 5
percentage-points actually attainable? What does industry benchmarks tell you? Are there enough potential
customers out there to warrant that increase? Do you have enough budget to pull it off, either through an
agency, or by doing it using your own man-power? In that latter case, do you have the skills needed internally?
R - Relevant
While some define the R in S.M.A.R.T. as “Realistic” we feel that this greatly overlaps with Attainable. Making
sure your goals are relevant makes much more sense. Is this goal relevant to your organization or team right
now? Does it adhere to your business’s greater goals? Are you the right person to pull this off? In the case of a
website rehaul it probably is relevant in that it will drive online sales. It also makes sense that you as the
marketing department are driving this.
T- Time-Bound
Making sure your goals are time-bound is something that should be obvious. When should this goal be
achieved? By setting a time-frame we know whether or not we hit or missed the target, and if we need to set a
new goal thereafter. In our example it might make sense to say we want to increase our conversion rate to 8%
by March 31st.
By setting up S.M.A.R.T. goals you’ll have a much clearer picture of exactly what it is you are trying to achieve.
It lowers the risk of misunderstandings, and also makes you better equipped for discussions pertaining to
budget or resource allocation for reaching it.

Understanding Marketing
Metrics
With online comes measurability. Something that, in all honesty, has been sorely lacking within the marketing
discipline for the majority of it’s existence.
It doesn’t matter if you have plenty of experience in online marketing, or you’re just arriving to the game- finding
what metrics to follow is always a big discussion point. What a lot of people don’t realize, perhaps blinded by
the sheer amount of things that can suddenly be tracked online, is that tracking too many metrics (or KPIs) can
become counterproductive.
Correlation ≠ Causation
Before we dig into what to look at, it makes sense to make sure you understand how to look at metrics.
Statistics 101 tells us that correlation does not equal causation. What does that actually mean?
Well, it means that metrics that seem to have a similar pattern does not necessarily mean they affect each other
in any reasonable and realistic way. For example, America’s per capita consumption of cheese follows a similar
pattern to that of people who die entangled in their bedsheets. Does that mean that eating cheese will cause
you to choke on your pillow-case? Probably not…

In a more relevant example: if visits from social media are up, but conversion rates are down, can you
automatically assume that social traffic is of lower quality? The answer should be “let me get back to you on
that”. You would need to look at specifically how visitors from social media are converting compared to those
from other sources. You also need to make sure you’re comparing the results across the same content, and
over the same, reasonable time period. Looking at an average number for both across an entire year might not
make sense. It might have changed drastically throughout the year, due to other factors like a change in
authors, navigation on your website, or social strategy. It would make more sense to look at specific articles,
and over a period of, say, a week or a month.
Essentially, improving causation is all about removing "C-factors" - things that could affect either metric that is
not taken into account in the initial correlation. In my above examples, C-factors would be that you're looking at
different content, different time periods, different people, or even that major local or global changes skewed the
numbers. This would mean that the correlation might simply be a coincidence, as with eating cheese and
choking on your pillow case...
Look at what you need, have the rest stand-by
If you have a dashboard of marketing metrics that you check daily, you can give yourself a pat on the back as
you doing your job right. However, if that dashboard includes 30+ statistics, spread across multiple platforms,
theres room for improvement (which is also great!).
Too many stats will take more time than necessary to get a good overview of how online marketing is
performing. A recent article shared on LinkedIn touted "75 KPIs every manager needs to know". While the
author might not have meant that these are metrics you need to keep a constant eye on, the amount is still
mind-boggling.
Also, if the metrics are spread across multiple platforms causation will be a lot harder to produce. If email
interactions are tracked separately from website behavior, finding out who did what becomes harder. With
tracking, fewer tools usually means better data integrity. This is due to the data being passed seamlessly
between different tasks or areas.
Sometimes orders from management, or vendor lock-in, makes this inevitable. In that case, integrating the tools
is recommended as that ensures that the data is passed along between the different systems. Either third-party
integration solutions or do-it-yourself API connections can achieve this. If you're doing it yourself, just make
sure you keep an eye on changing APIs, as that could cause the entire set-up to fail and refactoringcan be a
pain.
What’s great about only picking essential metrics to look at is that you’re not doing it at the cost of the other
metrics. Most tracking solutions today do not require you to choose which metrics to save, they will simply save
them anyway. Even though you don’t look at them everyday, they are still there, ready to be analyzed at your
convenience. That means that you can safely glance at your essential metrics, and have the rest of the data
stand-by when needed. Suddenly seeing an decrease in conversions? Well, let’s start by digging into

bounce-rate, check what pages are highest and if something was changed or added recently. If nothing seems
out of the ordinary, then you could keep digging and look at conversion rate for specific types of visitors (new,
returning, customers, non-customers) and see if there’s a pattern there. New visitors are, for example, usually,
to a larger extent, swayed by site design changes than returning, or customers.
Vanity vs. Actionable Metrics
Businesses vary wildly, and there’s isn’t a single mix of metrics that will work for all of us. Therefore it’s
important to look at the ones that are important for your specific business and site.
Metrics can be split into two categories, vanity metrics and actionable metrics.
Vanity metrics are those numbers that look good on paper, but which actually don't give any indication of how
your business or site is performing.
Actionable metrics are those which are tied to a specific, and preferably repeatable, task that can be improved.
These tie directly to how your business and site is performing.
Eric Reis, of The Lean Startup, talks heavily about the importance of looking at the right numbers, and goes so
far as saying that “vanity metrics are dangerous”.
Make sure you start at the correct end. Instead of looking at what your tracking tools allow you to track, start
with defining what your business- and site-goals are. E-commerce sites should obviously have a larger focus on
conversion rate throughout the checkout process, while a blog might be more interested in retention rate.
The maturity of your business and site is also something that plays big part in what numbers are important to
you:
● New sites and business (called infants) should usually focus on more traffic-oriented numbers. You
want to get interest and awareness for your site up. Visits, social media shares, subscribers are
examples of good metrics for this stage.
● As you move into the next maturity stage (adolescence) conversion rates become seemingly more
important. Number of sales, time-on-site, abandonment/bounce rate, and conversion rates is what
boosts your customer base.
● In the final stage (mature) you want to make sure you getting the most out of people who decide to
purchase, so looking at cost-per-lead, average sales value, profit, and returning customers would be
metrics that make a lot of sense to look at.

Some Best Practice
Metrics To Track
However, there are some metrics that make sense for most
people to track. There are also some that you should be
wary of, and make sure your interpreting them correctly.
Here, we have decided to split these into different marketing
services like email, website, and social media. However,
before we dig into those we need to discuss a specific
metric that has been the culprit of a lot of wrongly-based
decisions and opinions...
Conversion rate
While conversion rate can be a great metric to look at for
certain tasks it’s a horrible metric for others. What’s
problematic with conversion rate is that it has the
presumption that every visit to your site has the potential to
convert. While this is more true if you’re businesses is solely
e-commerce, there’s still several cases of when a visitors likelihood of converting is slim-to-none. A visitor
might be:
● Checking up on their order
● Visiting your careers page
● Looking for your contact details
● Grabbing a link to share with a friend
● A person without buying power within their organization, i.e. researching for their manager
You get the picture. Not all visits are equal, and you need to scope out exactly what data you are looking to
find. Conversion rate is obviously a crucial metric for companies to look at, but make sure you break it out for
areas of your site where it actually makes sense. Conversion rates for your product catalogue, features page,
shopping cart, and (to some extent) your blog makes sense. Looking at an average conversion rate across your
entire site won’t do your site, and marketing department, any justice.
First-time and returning visitors interact with you site differently as well. For obvious reasons first-time visitors
are far less likely to convert than returning customers, or even just returning visitors. Does it seem fair to group

all of these people into the same average conversion rate? To get a quick glance at how things are performing:
sure. To actually be able to make any meaningful marketing decisions: no. If you want to formulate a campaign
to increase conversion rates it makes more sense to scope it out into which specific people you are targeting -
like increasing conversion rates for new visitors entering from a certain channel.
Which brings us to channel. Different channels, or referrals, have significantly different conversion rates.
Smartinsights comparisonof conversion rates across different channels (above) show us that social media has
a lower conversion rate than visitors coming from search. And if you dig into what keywords bring people to you
site you’ll find that branded keywords (where they search for your company or product) will have a much higher
conversion rate than unbranded ones. Does it make sense to look at all the traffic as one single group? The
answer is probably no. At least not if trying to make any valuable decisions based on it.
If you’re going to be looking at conversion rates, and we are definitely saying you should, make sure you’re
going about it the right way. Scope it down into smaller tasks and groups, such as:
● Visitor type - returning, new, previous customers, etc.
● Channel - Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Email, etc.
● Tasks - specific landing pages, support tickets, certain blog articles, and so on.
So what should I be tracking?
Now that we’ve covered the conversion rate myth, let’s look at a few of the metrics that makes sense for a lot of
companies to look at. Note that these are just generalizations, what fits for you might be different than this.
Also, these are the metrics that give you a good overview of how your online efforts are performing. In no way
does this mean that you should ditch the rest of the metrics. Have them stand-by for when you see something

out of the ordinary, when tailoring certain campaigns, and when answering specific questions about certain
online efforts.
Website metrics to look at
When looking at website metrics it could make sense to break the website into different areas. Site pages, blog,
support area, online store, and so on.
Site pages
These are the pages that are part of your “regular” website. Pages that showcase your company, your
products, your team, and so on. Here’s a few essential metrics to look at:
● Visits. Get a good overview of whether or not you’re actually growing your website or not.
● New vs. returning visitors. Depending on your maturity these numbers will vary. But generally you
should aim at having a healthy number of new visitors to your site. However, if returning is low, you can
start asking yourself whether your positioning your products and services correctly.
● Bounce rate. Look at bounce rate specifically for pages that you plan on being entry pages. If this starts
spiking you’re not clear enough on what you’re offering. Either your driving the wrong people to your
site, or they don’t understand what you offer.
● Referrals. Get a good overview of what channels are sending you traffic. Which social media channels
give the most clicks? How much are you getting for organic search? How much from PPC? Adapt your
strategy accordingly.
● Conversion rate. Yes, conversion is important, though you should read the section above regarding it to
make sure you're tackling it correctly. For site pages it could make sense to break this out into a nice
graph that showcases it across different channels and visitor types. It could also make sense to
exclude certain pages, like your Careers-page or your Support-page.
Blog
We are breaking the blog into it’s own metrics area as some stats pertain specifically to blog visitors.
● Retention rate. A tool that allows you to see scroll-through-rate, how far down the article they scroll, is
advisable. If that’s not possible look at time-on-page. A big part of a content strategy is branding,
positioning, and though-leadership. Staring blindly at conversion rate means that you’re not seeing the
bigger picture, as articles that have low conversion rate could still be great for branding if the readers
love the content. That said, it still makes sense to look at…
● Conversion rate. Expect these numbers are lower than your site pages. People who are on your site

pages have shown an interest for your product, service, or company. Most blog visitors only have an
interest in a certain subject your covering. If the content is top-of-the-funnel (read: early in the buying
process) expect a lower conversion rate. However, if certain articles with a healthy amount of visits has
a low conversion rate, you could look at whether or not the call-to-action makes sense together with
the content.
● Referrals. Just like for site pages, look at your referral channels. If one is sending you more than others,
it might make sense to focus on that. Is there an opportunity to work with growing others?
● Subscription vs. unsubscribe growth. Visitors from email convert higher than other channels. Aiming to
have a healthy-sized subscription pool is a great goal. If you’re seeing a steady growth in subscribers:
awesome! If it’s stagnated, or the unsubscribe rate is spiking you need to start looking at what content
your producing. It might not be resonating well with your audience. Are you writing about the right
topics and is the quality good enough?
● Social shares. Social media shares are obviously a good thing, at minimum for increasing SEO. A high
share rate, doesn’t necessarily mean that conversions will follow though. Some data-mining showed
that a great amount of articles shared aren’t actually read. Think about why people would want to share
your content. Is it to help other people, to position themselves are savvy, to be humorous? Make sure
your articles would have a clear goal for why someone would share it.
But wait, isn't number of comments to articles missing? No, it isn't. Not all articles have content that warrants
interaction through comments. If your article actively seeks feedback from your reader in the comments field
then, by all means, track amount of comments for that specific content. There's really no point in doing it across
all articles.
Email
A good marketing strategy should involve at least some form of email marketing. We have chosen not to include
subscription rate in this category of metrics, as it fits better under Blog. But a few of the essential email
metrics, to get a good overview of performance, are:
● Bounce rate. Knowing how many of your emails actually reach inboxes is obviously vital. But perhaps
for reasons other than simply knowing how many people you’ve reached. You can divide bounce rate
into “soft bounces” and “hard bounces”. Without going to detail, hard bounces are what you should be
looking at. This means that your sending emails to non-existent addresses. Having too many of these
sends signals to your ISP that you're spamming.
● Click-Trough-Rate. Look at how many people actually click on something in your email. This means
two things: they’ve read the content and they want to know more. Which brings us to our next statistic
regarding what these people do after clicking…
● Conversion rate. Is the landing page you’re sending them to what they expected? If not, you will be

able to see that in the conversion rate.
Removing Open Rate - from essential email metrics was intentional. This is because, technically, there’s no
good way of tracking this. It is based on whether or not the images (which may or may not be part of your email)
was loaded in the email client of the receiver. And a large amount of people have image-blocking turned on in
their email client. While Gmail recently updated to automatically download images, several other clients still
have a lot of users who have it turned on.
Social media
Social media metrics can be a tough nut to crack. A lot of marketing managers want to see ROI quickly from
social media, since it is a time-consuming practice for most companies. However, social media is a lot more
about building relationships with your audience, understanding and helping them, and becoming a
thought-leader. Some top-view metrics to look at are:
● Replies and comments. Social media is about dialogue. Someone who actively takes part in a
discussion with you is much more interested than someone who just reshares or likes it.
● Click-rate. Several third-party services allow you to track how many clicks the links you share receive.
Keep an eye on this and use it to make sure that what you share is actually interesting enough to
warrant a click. As mentioned before, sharing something on social media does not imply that they’ve
actually read or viewed something. If it’s low see if you can work with finding an more suitable
frequency and timing. And stop only sharing your own content.
● Social influence. Kloutis a great catch-all metric social media influence. Use it to track not only your
own influence-score. There’s a nifty Chrome-extensionthat allows you to see the Klout scores of
people right on Twitter. This could help you prioritize which brand/product/industry mentions that
require your immediate product. It’s unfair, but popular people should receive your attention quicker.
So that’s it. A few online marketing metrics that might make sense for you to track in a daily dashboard. Make
sure you analyse your specific business and find metrics which might be key to you. The above ones should
work for most, and at least work as a starting point for developing your own dashboard of essential metrics.

Set up an Inbound
Marketing Team
Setting up the right team in order to create digital campaigns is
critical as adapting to the inbound methodology many times
imposes changes within the organization. We need to get the
team onboard writing content towards our Buyer Personas and
participate in the digital dialog by sharing content in online
forums and social media.
There’s no single right way to set up your inbound team, but in
our experience there are some roles that definitely makes a lot
of sense to have in your organization. Note that one person
could have multiple roles:
CDO: Optimize, analyze and measure operations of attracting
and nurturing leads and customers with help of the marketing
and sales software
Marketer: Responsible for assigning lead to sales owner, make sure the content strategy/blog schedule is
being followed and published and that social media is being monitored
Asset creators: A team that creates long term assets/offers to be used in articles for converting and leading
prospects down in the marketing & sales funnel
Writers: A key part is to have thought leaders who can write content towards your personas with a tone of
voice corresponding to your company’s values
Editor in chief: Control the content, create campaigns, sets up workflows with marketer
Social Ambassadeurs: Engage a team that can speak using the company voice and engage in online forums
and conversations
By having these roles in place within your organization you can achieve more effective content generation, as
well as more effective communication and goal setting.

Bring in the rest of the organization
Inbound is definitely not confined to the marketing team. By involving other departments you can make sure
that the rest of the organization understands what it is you’re doing as well as why. That way, you can leverage
people from these other departments to help you with idea- and content-generation.
Figure out which people within your organization have the best understanding of your Buyer Personas. Usually
these can be found in several other departments outside marketing, such as sales, product development, and
support.
Guide these people through what an inbound marketing strategy is, and why their knowledge is a great asset in
the execution of this. See if you can get them to help in generating content, or come up with ideas for new
content.
We often come across people within the organization that are reluctant to participate in helping with this. The
potential reasons for this are many - they don’t like writing, they don’t understand the value in marketing, they
aren’t comfortable in being a face outwards for the company. The most popular reason is, however, usually that
they simply do not have time. These are people where marketing isn’t their main responsibility. When faced with
prioritizing between their main responsibility, say supporting customers, and creating content the choice is,
rightfully, what their job role says they should do.
By establishing in senior management why content creation is vital to a successful inbound strategy you can
overcome this by allowing their managers to allocate time for content creation. If this is not possible, then a
great alternative is to leverage these resources for interviews about topics. These interviews can then be used
as is as content on the website, either in written or video format, or used as a basis for somebody else to create
content around the topic.

Conclusion
The Inbound methodology is centered around targeting the right people (Buyer Personas) with the right content
depending on how far they have come in their Buyer’s Journey. By offering quality content that solves their
challenges and pains they will voluntarily give away information about them. Using this information, and by
contacting them at the right time in the Buyer’s Journey, marketing can ultimately hand over qualified leads to
sales. The lead handling process will be more streamlines, and measuring ROI is more effective.
By leading the Buyer Persona through the Buyer’s Journey from awareness, consideration to decision the
marketing team ultimately help deliver sales qualified leads to the sales team.
Creating the right content, and optimizing it for search engines, is therefore pivotal to a working inbound
marketing strategy. It is also important to make sure you have sufficient tracking and metrics, as well as clearly
defined goals, to determine exactly how your inbound efforts are affecting the bottom line. It will also help you
tweak your efforts and iteratively work out what produces the greatest ROI for your specific company and
products.
We hope you found this eBook helpful. We’d love to hear any questions or feedback you have! Catch us on
Twitter, or contact us directlywith any inbound-related questions you might have. We can also offer a free web
reviewto see if your site is ready to generate more leads through an inbound strategy.
Finally, if you found this eBook helpful we’d be grateful if you would like to share it with your friends and
coworkers.

Let Doidea help you get
your Inbound Marketing
on track

Beginners_Guide_To_Inbound_Marketing

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (19)

Viewers also liked

Viewers also liked (15)

Similar to Beginners_Guide_To_Inbound_Marketing

Similar to Beginners_Guide_To_Inbound_Marketing (20)

Beginners_Guide_To_Inbound_Marketing