Key areas to prioritise when reporting Inbound to management

The plethora of metrics available in today's digital age can be overwhelming. Faced with an array of charts and datasets, discerning which metrics indeed indicate your marketing efforts and business growth can be challenging. To address this, let's explore the vital areas to emphasise when presenting inbound performance metrics to management.

Focus on people

Regardless of which reporting tool you use, there are typically standard reports on visits, Page Views and Conversions, but have you segmented it on the different phases in the journey towards becoming a delighted customer? This is where the Inbound methodology comes in hand. Using the Attract, Convert, Close and Delight phases, you will get much more relevant reports based on people’s mindset and stage of the decision process.

Use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for this part:

Attract

• Number of visits to onsite touch points.
• Number of ‘followers’ offsite (social media), i.e. offsite reach.

Convert

• Number of Subscribers—people who know about you and opt-in to get relevant updated from you periodically.

• Number of Leads—people that show more interest in what you offer than your subscribers have, e.g. by supplying their data in a form to download a content offer.

• Number of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)—people who are more active and identified as more deeply interested, sales-ready contacts than your usual leads but have not yet become business opportunities.

Close

• Number of Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)—those contacts we have accepted by your sales team as worthy of doing a direct follow-up with.

• Number of Sales Opportunities—contacts considered relevant sales opportunities in your CRM and actively pursued by your sales team.

• Number of Customers—people who have become actual, paying customers.

Delight

• Number of Evangelists (Promotors)—contacts who advocate for us and recommend us to others. Our NPS (Net Promotor Score) typically measures target group satisfaction.

How healthy is your funnel?

Let’s do a quick exercise. What would happen with the KPIs above if you stopped paying for your marketing activities today? Have you built an audience that will disappear when you stop paying for advertising, or will they still be there? If the source of your KPI performance is a paid source, you must consider shifting it towards a non-paid source, such as organic search traffic and offsite (social media) traffic. 

The next question to ask yourself is: Do all the parts of the funnel work or does it break down somewhere? I.e. is the top-of-the-funnel (attracting visits and converting leads) working? Is the middle-of-the-funnel working (qualifying leads and generating prospects for sales)? Is the bottom-of-the-funnel working (closing customers and creating promotors)?

If some part of the funnel is underperforming compared to the other parts, that’s likely where you should focus your efforts.

Revenue report

In the end, it’s all about the money. John Wanamaker once said, ‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is that I don’t know which half. ‘ Today, we can get hard facts on which of your marketing activities gives the most revenue.

Questions to answer:

• What marketing channels generate the most money for your business?
• Which content offers generate the most money?
• Are there certain segments of your contacts that generate more revenue?

Content is money!

Inbound is about providing remarkable content. So, if you want a successful lead-generating flow, there are some Content Reports to add to your portfolio.

• Content that drives Leads
• Content that generates Qualified Leads
• Content that converts Customers

Conclusion

You can use various tools to get the necessary data, each with its pros and cons (that might be a great blog post in the future, so stay tuned). And in the end, reporting is about story telling. You need to get the relevant figures that end up in action. 

So, if you, for example, have doubts about which figures to report to management, the above reports is where you should start.

Do not hesitate to talk to us about Inbound reporting!