Inbound marketing analytics: Leveraging data to optimize your marketing efforts

According to Gartner's B2B buying journey, customers today engage in a "non-linear" buying process. For each successful B2B purchase, you can pat yourself on the back, as the buying process has typically become more extensive, and your customer has said yes to your product, after crossing multiple stages.
    
However, you might want to consider the fact that the starting point of every business' buying journey is a web search. If you want to be in the picture, or your product (or service) needs to be considered when a business starts to search for a product that solves their particular problem, you need to be in the top 10, and your product should have a good online reputation.
    
Thankfully, inbound marketing can help you build that reputation. 

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is the process of driving customers organically by creating quality content on multiple channels, which will help them solve their problems. 
    
The content you create is accessed by both your customers and people who aren't aware of your products and services, which is its unique advantage. Since your content is also accessed by a new audience, the higher your content quality is, the better your first impression is. 
    
In total, inbound marketing helps build your product's visibility and credibility, which in turn helps build trust, and brings in more customers and more revenue. 

What are some popular inbound marketing channels?

There are a variety of inbound marketing channels available for you to create content on, to address your audience's problems. However, it's best to choose channels that are most used by your audience. Here's a list of popular inbound marketing channels that will help you build your online reputation:

• Blogs
• Landing pages
• SEO
• Social media
• Webinars

What is inbound marketing analytics?

Inbound marketing analytics is the process of evaluating your inbound marketing efforts and understanding whether your initiatives are driving expected results toward company goals.
    
However, most marketers are concerned with not being able to track the performance of their marketing efficiently. Inbound marketing data is harder to track, as it is scattered across different applications. 

Well, not anymore. 

Now you can automatically import data from multiple marketing tools, visualize every piece of data, and extract meaningful insights. It's all made possible with marketing analytics, using a modern self-service BI platform like Zoho Analytics. You can refer to one of our previous blogs on marketing analytics for an overview of analyzing marketing data from different applications.

Inbound marketing data analytics with Zoho Analytics

 Zoho Analytics, a self-service BI and analytics platform, offers data blending from 250+ data sources, which includes 15+ marketing tools.
    
With Zoho Analytics as your business intelligence software, you can analyze data from all of your marketing tools in one place, saving you the time and effort of juggling between apps. Also, the latest technologies in BI, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing, help you better extract key insights from your marketing data.
    
To analyze your inbound marketing data better, you can use marketing dashboards. Dashboards help you visually analyze your data from multiple sources in one single place and derive insights easily. 

Marketing dashboards are not the answer to improving your inbound marketing strategy; however, they will help you find the answers you're looking for, quickly and accurately.    

Inbound marketing dashboards

An inbound marketing dashboard will help you analyze all your inbound marketing data in depth from one place, which includes multiple channels, from SEO to social media to landing pages. 
    
All it takes is a one-time setup. Connect your marketing apps with Zoho Analytics, and let the data automatically sync at your preferred intervals. You can also create standard and custom reports that you use regularly to track performance just by dragging and dropping data columns. And don't worry, these reports get automatically updated every time your data is synced.

When using multiple marketing apps, you take in a huge volume of data—and the size of the data increases with respect to your product's stage and growth. With an inbound marketing dashboard, you can track the data that really matters to make better decisions.
    
It's all about extracting good data from the bad, and key insights from the noise.

Below is an example of an inbound marketing dashboard that has data from multiple marketing apps. For example, we've connected HubSpot Marketing for blogs and landing pages, Google Analytics for SEO, and Instagram and YouTube for social media. We've also imported data from Zoho Showtime for webinars.

(Click here to view an interactive version of the dashboard)

With this dashboard in place for your business, you don't have to check every marketing tool you use anymore. You have all the data in one place in the form of informative visualizations, and you can start deriving insights right away.

Speaking of insights, you can use this dashboard to better understand which landing page is performing well, based on the time on page, bounce rate, and CTA clicks. With these insights, you can further optimize the remaining pages and improve their performance. Likewise, you can also analyze the performance of blogs by reading time, social media posts by engagement, and much more. 

Bonus: Inbound marketing KPI dashboard

As a marketer, you'll already have your plate filled with different tasks, and you might want to track the performance of critical metrics quickly. That's when an inbound marketing KPI dashboard comes in.

You can create a marketing KPI dashboard by selecting key metrics that you want to track regularly. To learn more, you can refer to one of our previous blogs on KPI dashboards. 
    
Here's a marketing KPI dashboard that contains critical metrics that you want to track every day or at selected intervals.

(Click here to view an interactive version of the dashboard)

From this dashboard, you can keep track of important metrics regularly, without having to switch between different apps. If you notice a decline in any of the metrics, you can simply click the More info button to navigate to the main dashboard for advanced analysis.

Derive meaningful insights from inbound marketing data with Zoho Analytics

If you're using multiple marketing tools for inbound marketing and you want to analyze all the data in one place to derive meaningful insights, you can sign up for a 15-day free trial with a marketing analytics software like our Zoho Analytics and explore the capabilities on your own. 
    
You can also register for our personalized demo, to get an idea of how Zoho Analytics can help make better decisions with marketing data. If you have further questions or need clarification, you can write to us at support@zohoanalytics.com.