Inbound marketing is the art of exciting people on the internet about your offering and turning them into customers and fans of your company. At the same time, inbound marketing involves hard work and disciplined marketing management in the competitive struggle for the attention of potential customers. The high provider density in many industries, the short attention spans of internet users, and the massive content flood on the web make it increasingly difficult to penetrate and be heard or read by customers.

With inbound marketing, you can establish your company as the top destination and thought leader among your target customers in this environment. However, don’t view inbound marketing as a direct challenge to the competition. Instead, see inbound marketing as a strategic process where you aim to stay a step ahead in the competition for new customers' attention..

What are the success metrics of inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is data-oriented. This is beneficial, considering the poor data quality many marketing departments have historically had to work with—and often still do. Traditionally, marketing departments only had market research results about customer opinions, performance data from their own website (e.g., Google Analytics), and possibly sales figures from the sales department. However, even the most detailed sales figures do not reveal how many potential customers, for example, decided against your company or your offering at the last minute. Statistics only show how many customers actually completed a purchase or how many left—without indicating why they came on board or left. Inbound marketing fundamentally changes this.

Your marketing performance is fully transparent at every stage of the customer acquisition process. In the online dashboard of inbound marketing software, you have real-time access to current marketing data on traffic, contacts, leads, and customers of your company. Furthermore, you build individual relationships with potential customers well before the purchase and gain valuable insights into what these people are interested in, how your offers are received, and which competitors are attractive to your prospects. The best part is that you can manage and optimize these numbers directly from your desk, by revising your acquisition measures on your PC, testing new ideas live, and immediately implementing successful measures on a larger scale. This creates a whole new marketing culture. We have seen how motivating it is for marketing teams to track and shape the development of their customer acquisition performance in real-time with inbound marketing. Focus on the four central key metrics of inbound marketing: Traffic, Leads, Customers, and Advocates.

Monitor and optimize these metrics in parallel, and keep track of their development. With these four dimensions, you determine what your company aims to achieve and how successful you are in acquiring and retaining customers.

The first goal of inbound marketing is traffic generation, i.e., attracting as many potential customers as visitors to your website, blog, and social media presence. The next goal is to convert as many of these traffic contacts into named and qualified prospects, called leads. The following success metric is to convert as many of these leads into customers for your company. After the purchase, the goal is to support your customers throughout the entire duration of the customer relationship. Ultimately, the aim is to delight as many of these customers as possible to turn them into active advocates for your company. Traffic, leads, customers, advocates—these are the four main currencies of inbound marketing.

Of course, it is important to be successful at all stages of the process. However, the challenges and goals differ from company to company. And your goals may change over time. For example, you might have had a traffic problem yesterday, but today your biggest challenge is to successfully convert the significantly increased traffic into leads. Therefore, it is crucial to maintain an overview of all four success metrics at all times and continuously adjust and improve performance across all levels—from traffic to advocates—by, for example, implementing appropriate inbound campaigns to enhance achievement of the goals at each of the four levels.

How do you operationalize these inbound goals in day-to-day activities? How do you measure the success of your efforts at each success level? Each of the four success stages has its own key performance indicators (KPIs) that you need to measure and optimize in inbound marketing.