By analyzing your marketing efforts in the three different categories, the HubSpot Marketing Grader will give you a clearer understanding of the following:
Competitive Benchmarking
The tool gives you an idea of how effective your marketing efforts are when compared to your competitors (if you've manually entered any competitors on the competitor analysis page). This also gives you some idea of how far behind or far ahead you are of your competition in general.
Lead Generation
Based on an analysis of your marketing efforts, the tool will determine whether you're generating enough leads and sales. The Marketing Grader will identify whether or not your blog posts are linking to landing pages and whether or not those landing pages include lead capture forms. If you don't have landing pages or lead capture forms, you're likely missing out on a significant amount of leads--especially if you seem to be attracting a lot of visitors to your site.
The Marketing Grader will also identify whether you've implemented any automation tools. For example, a CRM will allow you to automatically track user behavior on your site so that you can identify what users you should engage based on their actions.
Mobile Responsiveness
Mobile responsiveness refers to whether or not your website is optimized for mobile use. If it's not, not only will it perform poorly for mobile SEO, but mobile users who do visit your site will have difficulties with navigation. Sites that aren't optimized for mobile use will often have difficulties loading properly or displaying properly on smaller screens. HubSpot Marketing Grader will determine how mobile-friendly your website is.
Social Media Presence
Social media marketing is a vital component of any inbound marketing campaign. The HubSpot Marketing Grader will take note of any social media presence you have (specifically, whether you have a Facebook or Twitter business page), how often you engage on social media, how many followers you have, whether your content is being shared on social media, and if you have links to your social media accounts from your homepage. The tool will give you an idea of whether or not your social media presence is bringing visitors to your site.
Blog Activity And Rss Feed
Your blog is the foundation of your content marketing strategy, which is why HubSpot's Marketing Grader will take note of whether you have a blog on your site and if you have an RSS feed. However, having a blog is one thing, having a successful blog is another. The Marketing Grader will evaluate your blogging activity and the effectiveness of your blog. For example, if certain blog posts are attracting more visitors than others, it may be the result of the blog titles you use or the type of content you are posting. When you post content is an important factor as well. Posting content to your blog regularly is important, or you could lose readers.
Does Your Homepage Have A Link To Your Blogs?
The ability to bring traffic to your blog is essential since your blog provides one of the most effective ways to capture your leads. The Marketing Grader will identify whether or not you have a link leading to your blog from your homepage. It will also evaluate the sharing capabilities of your blog.
Are Social Subscription Options Enabled?
Connecting your blog to your social media accounts is important because it allows readers of your blog to instantly follow you on your social media account with the click of a button. This way, when you post links to new blog content on your social media accounts, they will have a better chance of seeing it on their timeline.
Is Email Subscription Option Enabled?
An email subscription option allows blog readers to sign up for notifications of when new blog content is posted so that they never miss out on new content. It makes nurturing your leads much easier.
SEO
A website needs to be properly optimized for SEO to achieve high page rankings, which, in turn, helps to bring in more organic traffic. Marketing Grader will evaluate your SEO efforts in a variety of ways, including checking to see whether your images have alt tags, making sure that you have unique page descriptions, and making sure that you're not using your company name on the page titles.
Overall Analysis
In addition to evaluating your blog, social media presence, SEO, lead generation, and mobile-friendliness, HubSpot's Marketing Grader will provide an overall analysis, which will highlight some of the strengths as well as some of the weaknesses of your website, giving you an idea of what you're doing right and what you need to work on.
Judging the performance of your marketing efforts can be challenging. Generally speaking, you have to track various analytics and measure the data you collect against the goals that you've set for individual strategies and tactics. While this is extremely helpful for judging individual strategies, it doesn't really give you an idea of how your overall marketing efforts are performing. Fortunately, you can get an overall view of your marketing performance with HubSpot's Marketing Grader.
