It’s difficult to predict the results you’re going to get from traditional marketing. This means that more often than not you’re making a guess when you plug your marketing results into your business plan.
Inbound Marketing on the other hand is completely predictable and there is plenty of data to back that up. You can make a business plan, complete with realistic goals for your marketing results, when you’re doing your marketing under an inbound marketing strategy.
To make it easy for you to determine the results that inbound marketing will achieve for your business, we’ve created our Inbound Marketing Calculator spreadsheet. All you need are your current numbers for website visits, leads and sales and it does the rest. Enter these values and it will tell you what inbound marketing will produce for your business after 6 months, 12 months and 24 months.
I’ll start with the spreadsheet because I know you want to get it in front of you
This spreadsheet is really easy to use, all you need are some basic stats about your website. Collect the following information and open the spreadsheet:
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The number of Visitors, Leads and Customers your website produced per month 1 year ago
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The number of Visitors, Leads and Customers your website produced last month
If you’re not sure about these numbers, just have a guess. If you don't have last years number, again guess and make them a little smaller than this years.
Here’s how to work the spreadsheet:
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Open up the spreadsheet and you’ll see the table below
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The cells in blue are where you can enter your data
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Enter your visits, leads and sales from a year ago and for now
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The spreadsheet does the work from there
Click on the button below to download the spreadsheet to try it for yourself. Read on to learn more about how we calculate these results.
The results explained
The website will calculate the growth you have achieved on your website for the past year along with the growth you can achieve by implementing a typical inbound marketing strategy.
The spreadsheet shows what a typical inbound marketing program will achieve for you in 6 months, 12 months and 24 months.
The bottom table in this worksheet compares what you will achieve with inbound marketing to what you would achieve at your current growth rate after 2 years.
The image below shows an example of a typical B2B website.
In this example we see 26 more customers produced each month by the website after executing a typical inbound marketing strategy for 2 years.
Think about your ideal client, what is their lifetime value to your business and how much revenue will 26 more customers per month produce for your business?
How these results are calculated
These results are calculated from data provided in “Return on Investment from Inbound Marketing through Implementing HubSpot Software - January 2014”. This is an annual report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Data from over 5700 websites where inbound marketing is being implemented is analysed allowing typical results to be predicted based upon the starting point.
Our spreadsheet has a second worksheet which shows the multipliers you can use to determine the results you’ll get. I have included a copy of these tables here for your reference.
| Overall Increase in Visitors by Starting Volume of Traffic per Month | |||
| After Inbound Marketing for: | |||
| 6 Months | 12 Months | 24 Months | |
| 1 to 199 starting visitors | 6.0x more traffic | 13.4x more traffic | 13.8x more traffic |
| 200 to 499 starting visitors | 3.2x more traffic | 6.2x more traffic | 9x more traffic |
| 500 to 1,999 starting visitors | 1.9x more traffic | 2.9x more traffic | 3.9x more traffic |
| 2,000+ starting visitors | 1.5x more traffic | 2.1x more traffic | 2.5x more traffic |
| Overall Increase in Leads by Starting Number of Leads per Month | |||
| After Inbound Marketing for: | |||
| 6 Months | 12 Months | 24 Months | |
| 1 to 5 starting leads | 5.0x more leads in db | 15.2x more leads in db | 44.8x more leads in db |
| 6 to 20 starting leads | 2.8x more leads in db | 7.5x more leads in db | 22.4x more leads in db |
| 21 to 99 starting leads | 2.6x more leads in db | 5.7x more leads in db | 25.6x more leads in db |
| 100 to 499 starting leads | 1.8x more leads in db | 4.1x more leads in db | 12.4x more leads in db |
| More than 500 starting leads | 1.1x more leads in db | 2.8x more leads in db | 14x more leads in db |
You can see from these tables that the results you get from Inbound Marketing using the HubSpot software are quite predictable and depend on where you’re starting from.
The results are obtained through doing 6 to 10 hours per week on your inbound marketing.
Inbound Marketing - An effective strategy for growing your business
Because the results you achieve through inbound marketing are predictable. You can easily create a business case for starting your inbound marketing.
Knowing your average lifetime customer value and how many customers your website will produce over a given time for a given expenditure, you can determine whether inbound marketing is worth pursuing.
You can learn more about how you can grow your business with inbound marketing by downloading our free eBook “Grow Your Business Using Inbound Marketing”
Here’s that spreadsheet link again…
