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?

Use our sales funnel calculator to estimate the website visitors, contacts and qualified leads needed to support your revenue target. Use your own conversion rates where available, then compare the results with your current performance to identify where more activity or better conversion is needed.

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.

Agree on these targets with sales before increasing marketing activity. Both teams need a shared definition of a qualified lead and clear responsibilities for follow-up. Our guide to aligning sales and marketing explains how to put those agreements into practice.

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.

Build a regular process for testing, analysing and improving your marketing. Data is only useful when your team acts on it. Our guide to six marketing metrics every boss should care about explains which measures help connect marketing activity with business results. Use those measures to assess your tactics, identify what needs to change and test whether your adjustments improve performance.

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.

If you use HubSpot but struggle to see which marketing activities lead to sales, our HubSpot optimisation services can help you improve tracking, lead handovers and reporting. This gives your sales and marketing teams a clearer view of what is working and where prospects need more attention.

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

photo credit: tim caynes via photopin cc