What To Include in Your Monthly Inbound Marketing Review

The purpose of doing a monthly inbound marketing review is to measure the performance for traffic, leads, and customer goals. It’s important to know if you’re on track with the goals you have set for marketing efforts so you can capitalize on what’s working or re-focus what is not. With the ability to access an abundance of data that shows marketers how a campaign performs, it is crucial for companies to take advantage of these telling numbers. The best place to begin is by tracking the same metrics each month so you can see trends form as time goes on. 

Here are eight recommended reports to cover in a monthly inbound marketing review:

1. Overview of Goals 

Begin with an overview of goals your team put together and generally discuss how you measured up the past month. This is a great way to start the conversation before getting into the nitty gritty analysis.  Make sure to reevaluate these goals every quarter. Do they include sales goals and marketing goals? How are you doing compared to your overall company goals? Go beyond "Leads" and "Sales Qualified Leads". Set customer goals if you don't have them already.

2. Online Traffic 

Look to see if traffic decreased or increased in the past month. Some questions to ask yourself include: Which source of traffic increased/decreased? Did something big happen the month before? Did you do a mailer, trade show, or event last month? Any website partnerships that started or ended? The list goes on and on but the seven main channels you should be tracking are as follows:  Direct Organic  Referral  Social  Email  Paid  “Other”

3. Campaign Performance 

Recap key highlights of the campaign performance(s) like website visits to the landing page, lead generation, CTA rates, promotional social media messages, or any other relevant information that pertains. What did you learn? What can you do differently in future campaigns?

4. Landing Page Performance 

What are the top performing landing pages? This is a great metric to measure because it shows what topics the target personas are most attracted to. A few handy numbers to keep track of are landing page views, form submission rates, and new contacts rates.

5. Call-to-action (CTA) Clicks and Conversions

How are the CTA’s associated with your landing pages performing? What are the top-viewed CTA’s? What are top-clicked CTAs? You will also want to identify any CTA’s that have a much lower click-through rate and fix it. Perhaps you need to change the content, colors, imagery, or placement of the CTA. Additionally you should compare which CTAs have the highest number of conversions and promote those even more.

6.  Website Page Performance  

Determine what the most viewed pages are on your site. This will help you prioritize what to focus on in terms of optimizing pages, especially for SEO. Additionally, you should see how your pages perform in search engines, where they rank, etc. You should also consider whether or not your CTAs are getting clicked on those pages. Adjust as needed.

7. Blog Performance 

Review the top-performing blog posts. Some numbers to look at include views, CTA %, number of comments, and keyword rankings. This is a great report to review because it will give you insight on what to write about for future posts or premium content offers based on what is performing well. 

8. Social Media Reach & Interactions

Track how many messages you sent out, the overall reach per channel, and most importantly, which channels generated the most engagement and visits to your website. Assess your current social strategy and try to find where you can improve or what channels to capitalize on. If you are getting reach but no interactions, try changing the content of your messages or testing other networks.

9. Inbound Opportunities 

Based on all of the findings throughout the report, generate a list of inbound marketing opportunities that you can focus on for months to come. Perhaps, you need to implement smart CTA’s on your homepage because click-through-rates are low. Or, maybe you spend time on improving SEO for your top-performing pages. The inbound opportunities are endless because there is always something to improve upon!

There is so much you can report on with monthly inbound marketing reviews and they key is to simplify the information as much as possible. Try to ask yourself what the purpose of this information really means and do your best to present it a compelling way.

All of these recommended reports are easily generated on the HubSpot platform that SmartBug Media consultants work very closely with. If you are interested in learning more about this content management system, contact us today to see if it would benefit your company. Our team at SmartBug Media is happy to help!