This week's Content Marketing Tech Tool of the Week comes from Hubspot, which has created a new Grader site called the Marketing Grader. This grader allows you to evaluate the inbound marketing of your website as a whole, and compare it up to two other competitors. It offers additional insights that are completely relevant to today's changing marketing landscape, which aren't necessarily provided by the other Grader tools. It's also a great tool to use if you provide web development or business blogging services, as it gives you a way to compare a potential client to its competitors. This week's Tech Tool of the Week Update evaluates three critical areas of your online marketing:
- Top of the Funnel - Are you doing enough to bring visitors to your website and fill the top of your sales and marketing funnel? How are your content creation, optimization and website promotion skills?
- Middle of the Funnel - How do you do when it comes to converting traffic into leads and leads into customers? Do your landing pages, conversion forms, email marketing and social media efforts compare?
- Analytics - Do you know what marketing activities are working (or aren't working)? Do you measure your successes and failures?
I, personally, like the comparison to a competitor or two. Having competition is a strong motivator for me, and knowing that I am not doing as well as someone else in my field does not make me happy. For me, the Marketing Grader highlighted two weak points for me: a lack of search engine optimization of my internal pages, and a lack of engagement on my social media channels. The SEO is something that I need to take time to do in the next few days, while the social media engagement can be fixed with better blogging (and moving this blog from Blogger to my actual website. The Grader doesn't count this blog as part of my website, sadly. If it did, I would have better results. Something to think about.
If you liked Hubspot's other Graders, make sure to try the Marketing Grader out. When it provides the results, it does give you a list of actions to take in order to make improvements. That's always helpful, and so is this week't Tech Tool of the Week.