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Inbound Marketing Metrics for Small Businesses
If you’re exploring inbound marketing as a strategy to grow your small business, then you’re moving in the right direction. However, without understanding which inbound marketing metrics you should monitor, you are missing a critical step. In order to build confidence in your inbound marketing system and make future decisions easier and more effective you need to identify and monitor some key metrics.
Inbound marketing is a powerful way to draw in prospects that have already raised their hand to tell you in one way or another that they’re interested in your product or service. Creating content and distributing it through the right channels, at the right times and to the right people helps ensure you’re driving qualified prospects to your business.
When your small business is leveraging an inbound marketing strategy to grow your online presence, you’re no longer fighting for the attention of your buyers, but are instead creating positive experiences through valuable content tailored to their needs, that in turn attract your ideal visitors to your site and convert those visitors to leads and leads into customers.
As consumers we’re bombarded with information – sales pitches, ads, promotions, sales – and it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to discern what we should care about…so we eventually start to tune it all out. But with inbound, we’re bypassing all of that noise and putting your business in the right place at the right time in order to drive action. If done right, your content is addressing the wants, needs and challenges of your ideal buyers and for this reason will be the content they’re looking for as they search for information to education them, inspire them or make a purchase.
So you’ve identified you want to start implementing an inbound strategy, and may already have some of your content in place and are seeing some traction.
Make sure you aren’t missing a critical step.
Many small business owners fall into the trap of implementing an inbound strategy or starting a new marketing approach without first setting some specific goals.
Without goals, you’ll never be able to accurately measure whether or not you’re getting closer to your desired outcome. So let’s set your goals now. Get specific with your goals and set predetermined timelines for when you’d like to hit them.
Dig a little deeper…
There are a lot of factors to consider when setting your goals with inbound marketing, so take your time and really think through how your inbound marketing goals align with and support your business goals as a whole. In general, your goals with inbound marketing will fall within one of four categories:
While your strategy should encompass all of these actions, your focus will depend on where you are at in your business and what you are hoping to accomplish next. Once you’ve set your goals, you’re able to identify which inbound marketing metrics you need to pay attention to.
The metrics that matter to you are primarily dependent on your goals. While you should pay attention to most of the below metrics, to gauge the success of your campaigns you should monitor the metrics that are indicative of you reaching your goals.
Some of the most common metrics to monitor to determine if your inbound marketing efforts are successful include:
Once you’ve determined the key metrics you want to monitor based on your business goals, set some goals around each of your metrics as well. Hold yourself or someone on your team accountable for regularly checking progress toward your business goal and the metric goals. Don’t set it and forget it! You need this data to determine if your money is being well-spent, if there are other opportunities to capitalize on or if you need to make some serious adjustments.