Here’s the situation. You have a mountain of data, don't have much time and you need to demonstrate results and prove ROI. How are you going to climb this mountain and prove that you reached the summit?
Let me break it down into three things - the gear that gets you up the mountain, the routes you take to reach the summit, and the joy and excitement you get when you reach the summit.
Your gear [Content]
You have to analyze the gear you’re using to ascend the mountain. Is your gear what you need to reach the summit? Do you have enough gear? How old is your gear? How well does your gear perform?
This is your content. It’s the content that gives you the ability to start the climb to achieving your goal. You have to analyze how well your content is performing. Measure your:
- Landing page conversion rates
- Blog article views and comments
- Inbound links to your content
- Mentions of your content in social media
- Number of times video was downloaded and embedded
The routes up the mountain [Traffic sources]
There are many routes you can take to reach the summit. You need to analyze which route will be the most effective. Is one route easier than the other? Which route is the shortest to the summit? What route has the most complexities?
Your routes are your traffic sources for your website. People can find your site in a number of ways and you need to analyze what sources are working and which ones need improvement. Analyze your:
- Number of leads per source
- Number of qualified leads per source
- Visit to lead ratio for each source
- Trends overtime, meaning is organic search traffic declining?
- Number of customers per source
The summit [Leads]
You’ve made it to the summit – you demonstrated your abilities and proved to yourself you could do it. Now it’s time to reflect on the journey. How long did it take? How many challenges did you encounter? What gear was essential to you reaching the summit?
Leads are your summit and you have to analyze how you generated your leads. You should measure the number of leads, the quality of leads, length of the sales cycle for older leads, and what content created the most number of leads.
Now the journey is back down to base camp, but with remarkable gear you’ll climb right back up in no time.
How has your journey to the summit been?
Image credit: thisistheurlforourgeogblog.blogspot.com
