You put a huge amount of time and effort into your inbound marketing campaign, but how do you know if all those blogs, social media postings, and videos are actually paying off? With a process like inbound marketing, concrete, consistent, and profitable results take time. To avoid a lot of wasted effort, it’s crucial to have a plan and strategy in place to track your progress and adjust your campaign over time (as necessary). Only by doing that can you ensure your business gets on the right path as soon as possible.

Is Inbound Effective for Your Business: How to Track Your Inbound Marketing Progress 

1. Set Goals for Your Inbound Marketing Efforts

The only way you can effectively track your progress is if you have a benchmark from which to judge success. A given number of people visiting your site per day is great, but to know whether that means positive progress for your business requires you to set goals. Those goals should include both concrete numbers (of site visits, leads, and customers) and time frames (six months out, a year out, etc.). They should be closely aligned with your overall  business objectives and revenue goals.

Goals help you know where you want to go, and this, in turn, helps you tailor your inbound marketing plan to arrive at your destination in the most efficient way possible. Just remember to be patient as your inbound marketing campaign grows and develops—especially if you’re starting from scratch. When setting goals, be ambitious, but also be realistic.

2. Use Software to Easily Track Your Inbound Marketing Progress

If you’re new to the inbound marketing game, it probably won’t be long before you start hearing a lot about HubSpot. Among many other features, this software allows you to track the progress and effectiveness of every piece of content you publish and lead generation.

This includes

• blog posts
• landing pages
• e-mails
• leads

Effectively tracking progress is all about hard numbers and data. How many site visits did you earn this month? What was your open rate on an e-mail campaign? 

While HubSpot certainly isn’t the only inbound marketing software that generates reports, automates content, and integrates with CRMs, it is one of the best known. But the important thing is not that you’re using HubSpot; it’s that you’re using some piece of software or program that allows you to effective and easily track your progress through objective data.

If you don’t, you’ll never accurately gauge what’s working and not working, and you won’t know how best to tweak your efforts or replicate success.

3. Target the Right Customer with Your Inbound Marketing Campaign

There’s nothing more disheartening than generating a ton of leads but failing to convert those leads into new customers. If you follow the data and notice you are getting site visits and leads but failing to close, it might be because your content is targeting the wrong customer.

Before you start any serious marketing efforts, you should sit down and carefully create buyer personas for your product or service. This helps you determine what kind of person will be interested in your company. Think about gender, age, income level, geographic location, and many other distinguishing factors. Then create your content to specifically target those buyer personas.

If your content only attracts people who can’t afford your product, for example, that means you’ve spent all that time, energy, and money creating content that isn’t going to ultimately yield financial rewards. The only way to realize this problem—and correct it—is to analyze the data.

Whatever your business, the goal of any inbound marketing campaign is increased revenue. Remember, a huge influx of visits to your site doesn’t do you any good if those visitors don’t become customers. So, how will you know when your inbound marketing efforts are paying off? The easy answer is that you’ll see it in an increased customer base and generated revenue. But those results don’t happen magically. Success requires strategic marketing efforts that you then implement with consistency, dedication, enthusiasm, and innovation.