Toolkit: Marketing Grader and some Interesting Stats

Measuring the impact of online marketing efforts is easy thanks to HubSpot’s new Marketing Grader, a tool that analyzes more than 30 marketing effectiveness metrics, grades a business on a scale from 1 to 100, and provides simple coaching for those areas that fall short.

This rebranded tool was launched in early December, and reflects the growing importance of marketing beyond a business’ homepage and into other web avenues like social media.

Marketing Grader aims to answer:

•  Is my marketing more or less effective than my competition’s?
•  Are my marketing efforts generating enough leads and sales?
•  Is my web presence optimized for mobile devices?
•  How effectively is my business using social media?
•  What are the strong points and shortcomings in our marketing?

Do yourself a favor and take a look at this before your competitors do!  Find out your score today and I guarantee you will find 2 or 3 super easy things you could do to improve your score and your inbound marketing strategy!

Fascinating statistics from Marketing Grader data

In it’s first week of use, Marketing Grader graded the marketing efforts of over 140,000 companies! Here are some interesting statistics that were revealed:

• The average marketing grade was 45 over the 140,000 company websites and blogs.
• 49% of these companies had at least one landing page.
• The average marketer had 203 Facebook fans.
• 34% of these home pages have been shared on Twitter.
• Only 42% had a mobile version of their website.
• And most remarkably, only 14% of companies had a blog.

Our thoughts on the Marketing Grader

We have found the Marketing Grader to be an incredibly useful tool. It quickly identifies what your’re doing well, and what needs your attention on your website and blog.

Because the grader is run by an algorithm, it misses certain “human factors” in website design. For example, if your home page is excerpts from your blog, and the whole website is build on WordPress, you might get the message that you don’t have a blog (since it’s looking for a link on the home page to “blog”). Or you might get an unusual result where you appear to have an RSS feed but not a blog.

These details and more are under review by Hubspot, the maker of the Marketing Grader, and will be fixed in future enhancements. But none of these details diminshes the overall value of this tool for a quick analysis of what’s working and what’s not.