A brilliant tool to assess your online marketing

It’s hard to be objective about your own marketing campaigns, so I’ve been using HubSpot’s new marketing grader, and I think it’s an awesome online marketing tool. You plug your website’s URL into it and it gathers data you can use to improve your online marketing. It uses a number of metrics to assess your efforts, and while not foolproof, they’re a good guide to ensuring you’re doing the basics to get your website found and ultimately, to get sales.

The results are broken down into three sections: the top of your marketing funnel, the middle of your funnel, and your analytics.

Top of the funnel: leads

The top of your marketing funnel is all about how you attract potential visitors to your website.

According to HubSpot, “Creating, optimising, and promoting content are keys to filling the top of your sales and marketing funnel with more website traffic and leads… companies who create, optimise and promote their blogs get 55 percent more traffic and 70 percent more leads than those who don’t.”

Need some ideas for keeping the top of your funnel full? Areas to prioritise are:

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• Adding more pages to your website that contain unique and useful content; blogging works well for this
• Getting more inbound links to your website, for example by submitting your blog posts to other sites that will publish your unique content. (This gives Google a reason to seek you out as a credible authority on your areas of focus).
• Linking to your blog from your homepage – this is important because more people visit your blog than your other internal pages, and they’re more likely to click on your blog if it’s linked to from the home page
• Making sure your blog and website are well set up for search engine optimisation (SEO). For example, name all your pages and images so that all your content can be indexed by the search engines.
• Using social media buttons to make sure your content is easy to share

Middle of the funnel: Conversions

The middle of the funnel is where you convert traffic into leads and leads into customers. Priority areas for improving your conversions include:

• Adding a landing page with a conversion form to your website. This is a page that offers your visitors something in exchange for their email address. It’s worth spending time making your offer irresistible so that you can capture as many leads as possible.
• Adding calls to action that link to landing pages or your blog posts
• Sharing links to landing pages with forms on Twitter

Bottom of the funnel: Analytics

If you’re going to invest time and money in online marketing, you need to measure your success and failures and know which of your activities are working and which aren’t. Key priorities here are to add analytics to your website and your email campaigns and then use the data to determine how you can improve your campaigns.

How do you grade your own online marketing efforts? And what steps are you taking to improve them? Do you use any online marketing tools you would recommend?

Please share all below.