How To Assess Inbound Marketing Solutions Effectiveness

When it comes to assessing your inbound marketing solutions effectiveness, the first place your should look is to your metrics. As marketers, we work tirelessly to positively impact endless amounts of metrics – from web visits, email click-throughs and conversion rates to generated leads per channel, social media engagement and blog post shares.  

But, let’s jump up another level and look at things top down – at the marketing metrics that really matter to your clients and to your decision makers: things like total marketing cost, salaries, overhead, revenue and customer acquisitions. 

There are actually 6 main metrics to help you evaluate the effectiveness of your overall inbound marketing solutions strategy. These are: 

1. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) – the total average cost your company spends to acquire a new customer. 

2. Marketing % of Customer Acquisitions Cost – the marketing portion of your total CAC, calculated as a percentage of the overall CAC. 

3. Ratio of Customer Lifetime Value to CAC (LTV:CAC) - a way for companies to estimate the total value that your company derives from each customer compared with what you spend to acquire that new customer.

4. Time to Payback CAC - shows you the number of months it takes for your company to earn back the CAC it spent acquiring new customers.

5. Marketing Originated Customer % - a ratio that shows what new business is driven by marketing by determining which portion of your total customer acquisitions directly originated from marketing efforts.

6. Marketing Influenced Customer % - takes into account all of the new customers that marketing interacted with while they were leads, anytime during the sales process.

Instead of spending so much time in the minutiae – in evaluating the little things like per-post Facebook engagement and other “softer” metrics – use these six metrics to report on how your inbound marketing solutions are leading to new customers, lowering customer acquisition costs or raising the lifetime values of customers. These sorts of metrics help you prove your worth to the decision-makers that matter – and shine a spotlight on what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong.

It’s still important to pay close attention to site traffic, social shares and conversion rates – but it’s not enough for a blog post to get a couple dozen views or a Tweet to get RT’d fifty times – you need to collect and report data that proves the impact of these events and that proves your worth as a marketer.