Knowing if your inbound and digital marketing campaigns are resulting in increased revenue is vital for remaining competitive in any industry, but it also helps you measure the success of your campaigns and prioritize your efforts. Luckily, there are several free tools for you to use.

As a marketing manager, you dedicate your time and effort to building and executing strategic campaigns that are geared towards increasing awareness, attracting more leads, and establishing your brand as an industry thought leader.  

Perhaps you put the marketing budget towards a newly designed website or a paid advertising campaign on social media, or you spent billable hours creating a content offer. Whatever it is, you are making an investment in something you hope will achieve your goals, and ideally you would like to see a return on that investment (ROI), whether that means you gain customers or build a larger audience.  

Seeing results from a strategic marketing plan takes time, and sometimes campaign strategies need to be shifted slightly to improve those results. There are a variety of tools that can help you track the performance of your inbound and content marketing campaigns, verify your strategy is working, and see how you measure up against your competition. Here are six of our favorites at Matter Portsmouth.

ROI Calculator

 Shameless plug alert! Calypso recently developed a great tool to help you and your team calculate the return of your inbound efforts. Our ROI calculator is a great tool to use to learn how your analytics impact your bottom line. To begin, the calculator will ask you for the following criteria:

• Average monthly website visitors 
• Average monthly website leads
• Percentage of qualified leads
• Close rate percentage
• Customer lifetime value

With a simple click of a button, the calculator reveals the following:

• Conversion rate
• Average new customers per month
• Average qualified leads per month
• Gross profit per month

 This tool provides an accurate picture of your organization’s growth (or decline).

CALCULATE YOUR ROI

Hotjar

Hotjar is a user-friendly feedback and analytics tool that allows an organization to collect user behavior data from its website. By adding Hotjar to your site, you can observe how visitors interact with your website content. The tool provides live recordings and visual data that represent various activities like page taps, scrolls, and clicks. 

This information helps you get an understanding of visitor activities so you can improve user experience (the better the visitor experience, the increased likelihood of converting and retaining visitors). Hotjar has a free version that gives users limited access, but also offers a variety of paid options with increased benefits as well.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a website analytics platform that helps users understand their customers. Google Analytics reveals data on a month-to-month basis, which can be used for a monthly progress report. You can also analyze your conversion rate, which is an indication of how many visitors are either opening your emails, signing up for a consultation, or filling out a submission form. 

Google Analytics provides information on the viewers’ demographics, how long they are staying on the website (bounce rate), and what devices they are visiting your website on. Once the visitor becomes a customer and invests in your product or service, you can say that your strategic marketing initiative is successfully increasing the ROI. 

Website Grader

Website Grader, a free tool powered by HubSpot, analyzes your website and provides an overall score by measuring upload speed, mobile optimization, search engine optimization (SEO), and security. 

If the website grader gives you a poor grade, it is an indication that you may need to make some changes to improve your user’s experience. A website that is slow to load or is distorted on a mobile device will only discourage users from visiting your website, and if your SEO isn’t working, visitors won’t even be able to find you in the first place. 

As your website is often one of your most important sales tools and doesn’t come cheap, protect your investment by making sure your website is attracting the right visitors and keeps them coming back. 

Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights is a tool that discloses information on how your social media account is performing. It can easily track the performance of your Facebook page and each individual post, as well as your followers’ behaviors. Facebook Insights helps to optimize social presence. 

For example, out of three posts that contain either text, video, or photography, you may notice a video post has the most engagement (viewers, comments, likes, and shares). When studying your audience, you realize your followers are most active on Facebook between the hours of 7:00 pm and 9:00 pm. To optimize your content, your company should consider posting during the “active” times and to utilize video content to obtain the largest reach.

Paying attention to your visitors’ habits and making adjustments based on those findings will help improve your digital presence and engagement on social media. In turn, the money or time you spend on social media management will be worth the investment.

HubSpot Marketing Dashboard

As a proud HubSpot partner, we couldn’t forget the HubSpot Marketing Dashboard. The one-stop-shop for all of your important marketing analytics. In a few seconds, you will be able to see how your website is performing, as well as your overall inbound marketing endeavors. 

Perhaps during your internal brainstorm with your team, you decided to focus on blogging for the upcoming year to help increase awareness and reveal your premier industry knowledge. In your meeting, you build a strategic content calendar that outlines specific blog topics and frequency. 

When implementing your blog campaign, the HubSpot Marketing Dashboard can streamline the process. It shows how many blogs have been published, how many views you’ve had on each blog, and how many subscribers you’ve received as a result of your campaign. 

Developing a strategic plan is crucial to the success of any marketing campaign. However, understanding when to make changes to your strategy is also important. Utilizing the tools outlined above will help your team make the necessary adjustments to ensure you are optimizing ROI.