Do you know your marketing maths? Can you recite your buyer stage conversion ratios to your boss, off the top of your head, when you next meet her in the elevator?

• Do you know how many sales qualified leads you need to generate from your online activities? And then...
• Do you know how many unqualified leads you need to generate on your website in order to deliver those those sales qualified leads? And finally...
• Do you know how many visitors you need to your site to generate the right volume of unqualified leads?

Download this simple tool that will help you calculate your marketing maths. Its only a starting point and ignores one crucial element - the time it takes for your buyers to move down the  funnel - but it will help you understand some of your core conversion ratios.

Once you understand your goals, you need to map this against where you are presently.

By working your way back up the conversion funnel you can reclaim control over where you should allocate your precious marketing investments.

Your marketing tactics should be built in response to generating sufficient marketing velocity to meet your firm's revenue goals.

As elementary as this may seem, many, many organisations we meet with either don't know their future marketing maths or don't understand their current marketing maths...or both!

The Power of Test-Analyse-Improve-Retest

Inbound or online marketing has one massive benefit going for it. It's measurable. It's possible for the smallest firm to genuinely measure their marketing investments without having to spend a fortune on a marketing automation platform. Sophisticated tracking is available in marketing automation software such as Hubspot and others.

But simply generating large amounts of data isn't enough.

Marketers must install a test-analyse-improve-retest process (perhaps even culture) in the marketing function. Data is only useful when it is acted upon. This eBook discusses in greater detail how you might install a testing regime. However, being agile in your marketing allows organisations to try a tactic, measure its success, adjust if its not working optimally, try and measure once more, adjust and so on.

The success rate of this agile approach has seen the cost per lead for inbound or online marketing fall by as much as 62% compared to outbound marketing. Finally the old cliché, "I know 50% of my marketing is working I just don't know which 50%," can be put to bed! Firms can cut back on tactics that aren't yielding results and reinvest in those that are.

Download our free eBook on how to use Inbound Marketing for lead generation.

photo credit: tim caynes via photopin cc