Welcome to the last part of our inbound marketing series. If you have missed any, feel free to go to the start of the series here.
The final part of the inbound marketing campaign is reporting the results. That can be scary, right? Maybe you didn’t get the results you wanted. Don’t be too discouraged if you don’t have the greatest results from your first campaign. Sometimes it hits the very first time, and sometimes it takes a while to build the results that you want. After all, if inbound marketing were easy everybody would do it, right?
Why Report? You have to report your results for two reasons:
- Your bosses probably want to know your results
- You need to prove ROI
One of my concerns with reporting on how awesome my campaign was is blowing your own horn. Why? Then I discovered that was silly. The rest of the company needs to know marketing’s ROI. If you don’t tell them how will they know?
Also, you need to reports on the results so you can get more investment for the future.
When to Report: You can start reporting on your results as soon as you have completed all the steps of the campaign. However, it might be best to give your campaign a little while to breathe and mature before reporting results. For instance, you report the first results a couple of weeks after your campaign steps are complete.
Remember you also want to keep reporting your results from the initial campaign as well as the others that you launch. Continue to report on your results from a monthly, and then maybe quarterly, time frame. This will depend on how often other members of the company want to know and other factors as well. 
What to Report: There are a large number of results that you can report on, and every company is different, so here are just a few that you could use.
- Visitors to the site
- Likes on the various social media networks
- Keyword rankings
- Visitors to blogs
- Etc.
However one of the key pieces of information to report is MQL or Marketing Qualified Leads. These are leads that came in through your inbound campaign and downloaded your premium content. They have an interest in what you do and are in your funnel.
This is what moves the needle for your CEO and CFO and sales directors. We all know that marketing is not just about leads, although leads are a good quantitative measure of ROI for inbound marketing.
Want to get the whole checklist on Inbound Marketing so you can start your inbound campaigns? You can download it here.