Grade Your Marketing Effort

Most of my followers know I love Hubspot. I have followed their philosophy around inbound marketing for several years and while I am still learning I try and share great ideas and tools from them and others in my website in the Stuff We Are Into section of our site.

Hubspot have a new marketing grader which I think is awesome. Let's look at this resource in more detail.

1. It is easy to use. Just plug in your website url into the Marketing Grader and it does all the gathering of data to help you improve your online marketing in a number of ways.

The tool looks at the Top of the Funnel which includes how you attract potential visitors to your website and uses a number of metrics. These aren't fool proof but they are a good guide to ensuring you are doing the basics to get your website found and convert as many potential customers as possible. The top of the funnel as Hubspot explains is about "Creating, optimizing, and promoting content are keys to filling the top of your sales and marketing funnel with more website traffic and leads. The good news is that companies who create, optimize and promote their blogs get 55% more traffic and 70% more leads than those who don't. "

After each section Hubspot provide some next steps you can take to improve your grade.

Top 3 Things To Do

1. Add more pages to your website containing unique and useful content, probably by blogging.
2. Get more inbound links to your website.
3. Link to your blog from your homepage.

I have made a big point of blogging over the last 18 months and continually try and encourage my clients to blog and submit those blogs to other sites to get their unique content published on other sites. This gives your site back-links or what Hubspot calls inbound links and gives google a reason to seek you out as a credible authority on your areas of focus. Having your blog on your home page is important as most people visit that rather than your internal pages. Thus they are more likely to click on your blog if it is at linked on the home page. Other good pointers from Hubpot include the search engine optimisation of your blog and website. Naming your pages and even your images so you can be indexed for everything you create and making sure your content is easy to share with social media buttons.

2. The Middle of the Funnel Hubspot describes as Converting traffic into leads and leads into customers by focusing on the middle of your funnel and using landing pages, conversion forms, email marketing and social media.

Again they give you some top tips to improve your conversion.

Top 3 Things To Do

1. Add a landing page with a conversion form to your website.
2. Add calls to action that link to landing pages to your blog posts.
3. Share links to landing pages with forms on Twitter.

Most clients I take on when I look at their website don't have a form to capture leads on the home page or know what a landing page is. A landing page is a page that has an offer to capture leads. It doesn't have to be a new page but at the very least a good offer that will make it likely for the prospect who visits your website to leave their email and name is a must.

3. End of the Funnel hubspot explains is the Analytics - Knowing what marketing activities are working (or aren't working) for you by measuring your successes and failures.

Again they give you tips on this section:

1. Attract more website visitors using inbound marketing.

It amazes me how many people still don't have analytics on their website or for their email campaigns. How can you make them better? How do you know if they are working. Analytics are key to improving your marketing. So if you haven't already why not add analytics to your website.

Just to let you know I graded my website and got 66 out of 100 so I still have some work to do but at least I have some next best steps. How did you go? Grade your online website here.

Happy Marketing!