Do You Really Understand What Your Inbound Marketing Metrics Are Telling You?

When most marketers hear the words “digital analytics” they tend to think of the usual metrics found in any top-level web analytics platform. Things like traffic, bounce rates and visitors; metrics that are often associated with tools such as Google Analytics.

While these web analytics can supply you with rich data about your website traffic and other performance indicators, they often fail to address the marketing metrics that we really need to know.

Inbound marketing provides the perfect platform to collate marketing-centric data that will help you position your RTO’s marketing strategy. They can help marketers understand aspects like detailed data on a prospective student’s journey down the sales funnel, and the response of conversion rates to particular campaigns.

I’ve already discussed the seven key metrics that you should focus on to measure the success of your inbound strategy. Now I want to talk about WHY you should focus on these marketing metrics, rather than just your top-level web analytics:

Inbound ties the metrics of different marketing channels together

Digital marketing metrics and analytics enable you to measure the performance of your different marketing platforms, such as emails, social media, blogging and SEO. While these metrics are important on their own, one of the best ways to measure their performance is to integrate and compare the individual channels.

For example, if you have an email campaign targeting a segmented list of your prospective students, then digital marketing analytics can tell you not just how many people opened the email, but how many went on to convert into students. Furthermore, you can then compare how well your email campaign performed compared to a blog you wrote or a video that you sent out on Facebook.

It focuses more people not page views

Marketing metrics and data are vital for understanding how well your RTO’s inbound marketing strategy is performing. However, people-centric data is often even more informative. Your data should show where your leads came from, how they are interacting with your RTO, what campaigns they are responding to and how they moved down the sales funnel.

These metrics will help you understand trends among prospective students, and determine which marketing activities are most effective at each stage of the sales funnel.

Align your marketing activities to sales

One of the biggest advantages of marketing analytics is that it enables you to provide “closed-loop” data and marketing metrics, thereby aligning your marketing activities with your sales processes.

For instance, your social media campaign might be great at generating leads, but is it actually turning those prospective students into fully converted sales? If your digital marketing analytics are linked with your CRM platform, then you can generate closed-loop data and find out the answer. For an example of a free integrated CRM platform, have a look at Hubspot’s customer relationship management software.

Inbound marketing is a digital marketing strategy to connect ALL of your Internet marketing tactics to generate more leads, students, student retention and ROI. If you only focus on top-tier web analytics, you could be missing out on rich marketing data that can take your marketing strategy to the next level.

Lupo Digital is an inbound marketing agency that specialises in creating and managing effective lead generation campaigns for RTOs. If you would like to know more about how you can develop a successful inbound marketing strategy, download our executive guide to inbound marketing for RTOs.