Most of my followers know I love Hubspot. I have followed their philosophy around inbound marketing for several years and although I am still learning, I try to share great ideas and tools from them and others in my website in the Stuff We Are Into section of our site.
Hubspot have a new marketing grader which I think is awesome. Let’s look at this resource in more detail.
1. Easy to use
Just plug in your website URL into the Marketing Grader and it does all the gathering of data to help you improve your online marketing in a number of ways.
The tool looks at the Top of the Funnel, which includes how you attract potential visitors to your website and uses a number of metrics. These aren’t foolproof but they are a good guide to ensuring you are doing the basics to get your website found and convert as many potential customers as possible.
This part is about creating, optimising, and promoting content, which are the keys to filling the top of your sales and marketing funnel with more website traffic and leads, according to Hubspot. The good news is that companies that create, optimise and promote their blogs get 55% more traffic and 70% more leads than those who don’t.
- Add more pages to your website containing unique and useful content, probably by blogging.
- Get more inbound links to your website.
- Link to your blog from your homepage.
I have made a big point of blogging over the last 18 months and continually try and encourage my clients to blog and submit those blogs to other sites to get their unique content published on other sites. This gives your site backlinks or what Hubspot calls inbound links and gives Google a reason to seek you out as a credible authority on your areas of focus.
Having your blog on your homepage is important as most people visit that rather than your internal pages. Thus they are more likely to click on your blog if it is at linked on the homepage.
Other good pointers from Hubspot include the search engine optimisation of your blog and website, such as naming your pages and even your images so you can be indexed for everything you create and making sure your content is easy to share with social media buttons.
2. The Middle of the Funnel
Hubspot describes this as converting traffic into leads and leads into customers by focusing on the middle of your funnel and using landing pages, conversion forms, email marketing and social media.
- Add a landing page with a conversion form to your website.
- Add calls to action that link to landing pages to your blog posts.
- Share links to landing pages with forms on Twitter.
Most clients I take on when I look at their website don’t have a form to capture leads on the homepage or know what a landing page is. A landing page is a page that has an offer to capture leads. It doesn’t have to be a new page but at the very least a good offer that will make it likely for the prospect who visits your website to leave their email and name is a must.
3. End of the Funnel
Hubspot explains that this is the analytics, knowing what marketing activities are working (or aren’t working) for you by measuring your successes and failures.
It amazes me how many people still don’t have analytics on their website or for their email campaigns. How can you make them better? How do you know if they are working? Analytics are key to improving your marketing. So if you haven’t already, why not add analytics to your website?
Just to let you know I graded my website and attained 66 out of 100, so I still have some work to do but at least I have some next best steps. How did you go? Grade your website here.
