Lead nurturing tactics are the main pieces of your marketing strategy that help build relationships with your prospects and turn them into customers. There are many ways to go about building a marketing strategy to support these conversations. Whether your focus is nurturing leads with social media, email marketing, or anything in between, it’s important to understand if your efforts are working. Discover what metrics you should be tracking to analyze and optimize your lead nurturing strategies.
Importance of Tracking Leads
Understanding the behavior of your leads is a crucial part of evaluating your marketing strategy. Because it can take up to eight “touches” before a person is ready to make a purchase, tracking will help you know which lead nurturing tactics truly led to their conversion. In turn, you will be able to make better decisions about which tactics you place more of your budget and attention to. Say you’re running ads on Facebook and Google and you’re receiving many leads. Tracking the right metrics will help you determine if more leads are coming from Google vs Facebook. Then, you can shift your focus to the channel that is delivering the most success.
Now let’s look a little deeper into which metrics matter to your strategies the most.
Top Metrics to Track
There are a variety of different metrics you can track to understand your prospects’ behavior and evaluate your marketing campaigns. All of these can be tracked using tools like Google Analytics. Here are the top metrics to evaluate.
Website Traffic
Since your website is the hub of all of your marketing, it’s important to understand how your audience is finding you. Are they coming to your site from an organic search? Are they clicking on your ads? Are they visiting you from a social post or e-newsletter? This clarity will help you know how to best nurture your leads.
For example, if many users are finding you through your blog posts via their organic searches, it’s a good indicator that your SEO tactics are working. You may also want to customize your paid ads to retarget visitors that are reading that content and include your SEO keywords. Knowing this information, you can adjust your Google and social media ads to send custom messaging to these specific people and improve conversions.
Website Performance
Website performance is also another key element in determining the success of your marketing. This metric refers to what happens once someone reaches your website. It includes things like how many pages users are looking at, how long they are staying on your website, and if they’re immediately leaving after they click your links. In connection with where your audience is coming from, you can evaluate whether the content they are seeing is connecting properly. Let’s expand on the example of organic traffic above.
In this case, we know that people are finding you through organic searches. However, when we look at the performance metrics, we see a high bounce rate and a low number of pages per session. This indicates that although your keywords are grabbing people who are searching, the content on your website is not helping nurture their needs. These people are likely clicking on a Google search result, coming to your website, and immediately leaving. To improve this, you can optimize the page your audience is coming to with more relevant content, additional internal links, and even a contact form to help them reach out to you more quickly. Without these performance metrics, you’d have no idea how your pages were performing.
Conversions
The last top metric to look at is conversions. Depending on the goals of your business, a conversion can be a purchase, a phone call, a form submission, or even a download. No matter which goal is more important to you, tracking your conversions back to the source is key. Let’s look at conversions in regards to the organic traffic example above.
Say your goal is phone calls. Your analytics should display a high number of phone calls coming from an organic source. However, your analytics show a low number of phone calls, but a higher number of form fills from those organic searches. This could be an indicator that your call to action on your content is incorrect. Maybe the pages you are sending traffic to have forms and need a phone call button instead. Your conversion tracking will help you get a clearer indication of where your audience is feeling more inclined to take action and where you can make improvements.
It’s crucial to clearly understand what parts of your lead nurturing tactics are working. Evaluating your marketing strategy by looking deeply at the metrics that support your business goals allows you to see this clearly. Then, you can easily put your resources towards the things that are most profitable and adjust what isn’t.
On average, it takes eight marketing touches for a prospect to convert.
Looking to generate and nurture more qualified leads?
KWSM is on your team, we develop carefully crafted strategies and campaigns that convert strangers into potential customers
CONTACT US to schedule a complimentary brainstorming session on developing more quality leads and traffic for your business today!