Inbound marketing – the difference between potential customers finding your company vs. you looking for potential customers.  Maybe that is a bit to simplistic.  According to Wikipedia  – Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers by publishing helpful information on a blog, etc. {earning their way in} in contrast to outbound marketing via paid advertisements {buy, beg, or beg their way in}.

If your company is making the switch from outbound marketing and paid advertisements {which I’ve never found have worked well for our company} to inbound marketing; one of the things that you need to do is track how successful you are at publishing content on the web that is getting you found and analyzing if you are being found by the right people – you know – the ones that actually end up purchasing the goods or services that you offer.

I admit, I still struggle with this.  Like many business owners I only have so many hours in my day and I don’t have the luxury of hiring someone just to market our business or monitor the various social media platforms we are on.  Our marketing department consists of “me, myself, and I” and I can tell you that “I’m” very busy!

I know that analyzing and tracking information such as this is important:

• how many hits or page views that our website and blog receive
• are people sharing the information they find on social media networks
• are people printing out the information they fin
• are they purchasing the higher end QuickBooks training that is offered here
• what are the most popular pages on our blog or or website
• how many people actually request trials of our software
• how they found us/where these visitors are coming from
• how many people actually buy our software {or hiring me to do some QuickBooks consulting} after visiting our sites

I do have some things in place – I have a Google Analytics account for both our website and our blog and some other tracking plug-ins on both our main website and here on our blog.  And I do look at them occasionally – probably not often enough though; and I have to admit I’m often overwhelmed by the amount of data that I see.  With that, onto today’s eBook from Hubspot!

Free eBook: An Introduction to Inbound Marketing Analytics

Analytics programs can give marketers amazing insight into their marketing campaigns, but this wealth of data comes with a cost.  There’s just so much information – and so many possible combinations of metrics and reports to track – that many marketers get overwhelmed trying to make sense of it all.

But don’t let data overload stop you from using analytics to improve your marketing effectiveness.

Hubspot’s free ebook highlights the essential inbound marketing metrics for data-driven decision making, along with advice for how to use that data to improve and optimize your marketing efforts.

This 85-page guide from HubSpot will teach you how to effectively analyze the following marketing channels:

• Your Website & Landing Pages
• Search Engine Optimization
• Paid Search
• Business Blogging
• Social Media
• Email Marketing
• Lead Nurturing & Marketing Automation
  

Start analyzing and improving your marketing today by clicking this link and completing a short request form.

I will be honest – I have downloaded the eBook, but haven’t read the entire thing yet – but it looks pretty interesting and I’m hoping that it will help me to get on track to develop some sort of tracking system or at least to better understand the data from my Google Analytics account!

Have a great Friday everyone!