While content creation is an essential aspect of inbound marketing, it's not nearly as effective if you can't analyze its impact. The best inbound marketing agencies provide their clients with copious amounts of data to illustrate the effectiveness of various types of content.
To ensure that your inbound marketing campaign works as efficiently and fruitfully as possible, make sure you have access to these types of data from your team.
How well does each piece of your content perform?
One of the most powerful ways you can increase traffic (and conversions) is to determine which pieces of content garner the most pageviews. For instance, your inbound marketing agency should tell you which of your blog posts attracts the most search engine traffic. Armed with this information, you can replicate those results by producing similar content in the future.
While some blogging platforms provide you with access to information about popular posts, you need a more comprehensive overview. What about content on other platforms, such as your website or social media? It's up to your marketing agency to provide that data.
It's one thing to attract visitors to your website, but quite another to turn those visitors into customers. Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who become paying customers. According to Michael Hanna of Business2Community, high-volume traffic that corresponds to low conversions is actually worse than low traffic and low conversions.
If you know that your blog content receives thousands of visits per day, but you're not making any sales, you can address the issue and implement some inbound tools and strategies to improve your conversions. However, you have to know the numbers to make that call, so it's essential to get this data from your inbound marketing company.
Where does your traffic come from?
If you don't know how potential customers find your content, you can't concentrate your efforts in those areas. Do people find your blog posts via search engines, social media, email marketing, or some other source?
The best inbound marketing agencies will provide you with data to show how your customers locate your content. If you examine your social media marketing efforts and discover that Facebook sends you 80 percent of your traffic, you know you should increase your Facebook presence to improve conversions and increase brand visibility.
It's true that keywords have fallen out of favor in terms of stuffing as many of them into your content as possible. However, don't assume that keywords don't matter. They're still among the top factors in SEO (search engine optimization), so you need to know how you rank for critical keywords and key phrases.
If your inbound marketing agency doesn't furnish you with numbers, however, you can't make critical changes to improve your rankings in the SERPs (search engine results pages). It might be time to find an alternative service provider.
Inbound marketing agencies can help you to optimize your content, research keywords, and build comprehensive marketing campaigns. Get your free copy of our Ultimate Guide to Hiring an Inbound Marketing Agency to learn more about the qualities you should seek when hiring a marketing firm.
Make sure to connect with us on LinkedIn to get valuable insight on the latest news in marketing and website design. Follow us here:
Mark Parent : November 9, 2015 10:51:42 AM EST
According to James A. Martin of CIO, SEO (search engine optimization) and social media walk hand-in-hand and drive the majority of content marketing...
Mark Parent : June 3, 2016 3:10:18 PM EDT
Outbound marketing existed before inbound marketing, but the two don't really share the same approach. It was merely called marketing, and it took...
Mark Parent : March 28, 2016 12:12:20 PM EDT
Everyone loves to check the metrics on a piece of content and see sky-high traffic levels. But that shouldn’t be the end goal for your inbound and...
