At the end of the day it's all about business value: generating and growing revenue. That means attracting visitors to your Web site, converting traffic to leads and nurturing them to become customers.
But how much visitor traffic and leads do you really need to achieve the revenue goals required to grow your business online? That's where the Inbound Marketing Calculator Tool comes into the picture. And I'd like to share the story of how it was developed into a MS Excel doc - and morphed into a Web page widget.
The Call for a Bottoms-Up Approach
In the Spring of 2010 I read with much interest the post by HubSpot's Peter Caputa, Calculating How Much Revenue You Need to Hit Your Monthly Revenue Goals. Instead of focusing on Web design/re-design, social media or any other tactical initiative, the bottoms-up approach first asks, "How much new monthly revenue do I need from my inbound marketing efforts to grow my business?"
Inbound Marketing Funnel Courtesy HubSpot
Once the (bottom of the funnel) revenue goal is in focus you then begin to work your way up the sales and marketing funnel to quantify and calculate the number of customers (sales), leads and visitors needed to achieve it.
The math Pete laid out in his post got me thinking. Why not build a calculator tool to make it easy? And so I did.
The First Inbound Marketing Traffic Calculator
Prior to launching B2B Inbound, I published on ZephyrMarketing.net, An Inbound Marketing Traffic Calculator - a blog post with free downloads of the MS Excel based calculator tool.
The calculator tool started to catch on and provided value to marketing agencies and Web site owners to focus conversations they were having around Web development, design/re-design on what matters most: Revenue and ROI. See the post Set Your Ideas Free. Watch Them Grow for evidence of this and increased utilization of a business-driven approach to Web sites.
A Lead Generation and Training Tool
So, as the story unfolds, the calculator became a lead generation tool. Pete had some ideas about making some tweaks to the calculator (additional inputs: percent of revenue from inbound marketing and current and goal conversion rates). It became a collaborative effort between HubSpot and myself (B2B Inbound) at this point. And, each of us began promoting and offering the enhanced tool on landing pages of our Web sites:
Pete also began using the calculator in VAR training webinars. And, here's another HubSpot example on their inbound marketing blog: 2011 Revenue Goals: How Much Traffic Do You Need to Succeed?
I began having other ideas.
A Simple to Use Web Page Calculator
I felt the need to make the calculator easy to use. And I wanted users to be able to access and work with it right on the page, without having to download it.
I was also reading an article on inbound link development and it was talking about ways you could attract inbound links to your Web site. One of the methods was to use widgets people might find useful. Get where I'm going with this?
So, I thought why not build an easy to understand and use tool, display it on a Web page for people to use and hope it may also become something they'll want to link to and share. Could be a win-win.
I worked with JC Cameron of Revenution to build the inbound marketing calculator tool. (If you're looking for a widget for your Web site I highly recommend JC, he was terrific to work with.)
I sincerely hope the Inbound Marketing Calculator Tool helps you generate revenue for your business. And, let me know If you're looking for help generating traffic and converting visitors to leads. That's what we do.
Best regards,
Greg Elwell
B2B Inbound