Back in the day you had to hire an agency just to come in and evaluate your online marketing efforts and recommend a strategy for increasing brand awareness and capturing sales leads. Not anymore. With HubSpot's Marketing Grader you get a pretty complete picture of your strengths and weaknesses and some great tips for improving things. Best of all, it's fast and FREE! Let's take a closer look. I'm going to compare our inbound marketing with HubSpot's own efforts and see how we stack up next to the 800 pound gorilla in the field.
The process couldn't be any easier. Just go to http://marketing.grader.com and enter your website into the Website URL box. You can see how your competitors compare with your site as well by entering their websites into the Competing Websites box. Marketing Grader analyzes your website, blog and social media accounts. If the program can't find your blog or social media accounts linked to your website, it will prompt you for the information. Once the analysis is complete, you get a comprehensive report that you can print or share. Your assessment is broken down into the three main sectors of the classic sales funnel - Top of the Funnel (ToFu), Middle of the Funnel (MoFu) and Analytics. In each sector HubSpot grades your site on several key elements:
Top of the Funnel
Not too shabby. Our score of 94 compares quite favorably with HubSpot's score of 95. Looking at the sector break-downs, we are doing great at raising our brand awareness and bringing in visitors at the top of the funnel. Our blogs and free downloads, like our inbound marketing cheatsheets have been very popular and continue to drive lots of leads our way. Looking at the middle funnel, both companies could use some work here, with identical scores of 75. In our case, Marketing Grader "dinged" us for not doing enough conversation on Twitter (i.e. too much content promotion, not enough relationship building). I think this is a fair assessment, and I suspect that HubSpot is guilty of this too. We both have the gamut of analytics set up and running, so we get 100% scores. To be fair, HubSpot gets a couple of orders of magnitude more volume of traffic and leads than we do, but somehow Marketing Grader must know that we are a smaller company. Pretty smart, huh?
Go ahead and run the report. Read it carefully. This is a great way to see where you are in building and growing an effective inbound marketing program. You can immediately see which items and strategies could use some rethinking or additional resources. We use Marketing Grader for our clients and prospects to help them understand where they are now and how they can improve their marketing results. We take the report and drill down on each element to make very specific recommendations on content, social media, lead generation and analytics. Marketing Grader is still in beta, and HubSpot is working hard to iron out the wrinkles. They are more than happy to hear your suggestions for improving the "Grader" products. Once you've done your self-assessment, contact us for a more in-depth consultation. Inbound marketing is what we do.
| Follow @jmctigue |
| Follow @Kuno |
Create and manage an effective mobile website while getting the attention of mobile visitors, keeping their interest with mobile-ready content and capturing them as sales leads.
