We say inbound works, and we can prove it!
We're halfway through 2018! Time flies when you're having fun, huh? We've been hard at work improving our inbound marketing strategy, and boy has it worked! The best thing? We can prove it!
We wouldn't promote anything we hadn't tested first. But now we have, see the results for yourself, and see how inbound marketing can work for you.
1. Sessions
You don't get much custom without getting people to your website! That's why we decided to focus on getting more people to the Red-Fern website. And boy has it been working.
We've seen a record amount of traffic to our site this year, it peaked in June and it will continue to grow throughout the year if we keep up the good work.
How have we done it? By creating more content! Our blog pieces are usually between 1500-2000 words, contain relevant keywords and are always optimised for search engines and readers.
If you want more web traffic, start blogging more!
2. Sessions by Source
We make a big point of trying to generate our traffic organically, we still use paid advertising, but as a booster, not the main strategy.
That's why we're happy to see that's where most of our traffic is coming from, and that it's growing organically.
As you can see, traffic from emails is improving and so is our direct traffic. It's important to grow wherever you get traffic from, just remember your main focus.
Consider other types of traffic like social and paid, some companies can survive on social alone!
3. Landing Page Performance
The best thing about generating more web traffic? Getting more landing page views! In case you don't know, a landing page is a page you're taken to after clicking on a call-to-action, which is usually when you want to download a premium resource or buy a product.
Getting landing page views is great, but it's only worth it if people are submitting their information. It's important for us to get a good conversion rate from our landing page views. We could have had 100 new submissions, but if 1,000,000 people had viewed our page the Click-through-rate will be 0.01%!
The number difference between submissions and contacts is the number of people that have already submitted their information to our website.
Both have their benefits, people that are submitting again may be progressing down our marketing and sales funnel, and new contacts may be starting their journey, so we welcome both!
Consider how the four metrics sync with each other, and how one underperforming metric could affect all of them!
4. New Contacts
Gold dust! Our new contacts are our potential partners, so it's important we keep attracting them. Don't mistake this stat for 'new customers' though.
Not all contacts will be worth following up, we get students, other marketing professionals and people from far away lands downloading our resources.
What we can take from this stat? Our resources are interesting and people want to download them. Even though we target potential business partners, it isn't an exact science.
Are your sales and marketing staff qualifying leads? In order to make them customers, you need to work out if you're a fit!
6. Social Interactions
When you have a lot of fresh content, you need to distribute it! Rather than relying on search engines to pick it up, we promote all our content through social media.
This isn't just written content as well, we've been posting pictures and will be starting to post more social videos in the near future.
We aim to get people interacting with our social content, it means it's relevant and captivating. we've achieved that goal, so we'll be improving and developing our strategy.
Content promotion is a two way interaction, if your customers aren't interating, are you interesting enough?
7. Email Performance
But one metric is red?! We know, but things don't always work out how you want them to. The positives are that our other metrics are improving.
We're sending more emails and more people are opening and clicking them, although our click percentage is down. The good thing is that anything above 2% is still considered a good click-through-rate.
Unfortunately, we've gone from absolutely outstanding to good! So although it isn't ideal, it isn't a complete failure.
Consider what content you're sending to different buyer personas, what's relevant for one might be useless to another
