How do you define marketing success?

Let me guess: you spin up a couple of blog posts.

You post everything out to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

You even hire an SEO firm to make sure your site ranks highly in Google Search results.

Then one day, it finally happens:

You hit the traffic gold-rush. Swarms of hot leads flock in unannounced, and you’re buried under piles of highly qualified prospects.

You’ve now got a hefty backlog of new leads and you’re feeling like you’re on top of the world. Now, you’re not REALLY sure where they all came from… but it’s no big deal, right?

Wrong.

Sure, you should go ahead and celebrate —  get up and do a little dance if you must. Strut like a peacock!

But if you truly felt blindsided by this surge of traffic, you’ve still got MAJOR work to do if you ever want to see those kinds of results again (and something tells me you do).

Here’s a shocking fact: most people approach their Inbound Marketing Strategy all wrong.

Because, the truth is, if you don’t know what’s working and what isn’t, you’re pretty much just closing your eyes and throwing a dart at a dart board. Every. Single. Time.

Instead, you want to make sure you’re squeezing as much juice out of each and every blog post, tweet, or landing page you spend your time and money on creating in the first place.

Here’s the definitive 2-step process to make sure your next influx of traffic isn’t a surprise, but rather a strategically planned event:

Step 1: Find What Works

You know that saying “throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks”? That’s exactly what you want to do AT FIRST, when it comes to inbound marketing.

Of course there are ways to make sure you’re answering the questions your target audience actually cares about, and also proven systems to make sure your leads are being checked on all behind the scenes.

But right at the beginning, it definitely is going to feel like you’re testing a ton of new strategies, until you find your marketing “sweet spot”.

But once you’ve found something that works for your business, it’s time to STOP. Stop throwing delectable strands of Italian food against the kitchen wall. Instead, hone in on those one or two strategies that have produced tangible results for YOUR business.

So how do you find out what’s working and what isn’t? Reporting.

Once you strike gold with a strategy or two, it’s time to dig deep. Look at your numbers, and figure out which strategies are actually producing concrete results for your business. We wrote a post earlier on link-tracking and analytics. So, if you haven’t read that, you’ll want to check it out here.

And if it ever feels like too much to handle, we can help in that department, too.

But I cannot stress enough the importance of keeping tabs on the inner workings of your marketing strategy so that when you get a surge of something — something good— you know where it came from and how to reproduce it.

Step 2: Do More of That

It sounds simple…but don’t roll your eyes!

Want to know how many people find something that’s working, but keep forging on with new strategies instead of doing a double-take?

Yeah, way too many. Once you’ve found something that WORKS, it’s time to focus in on it, and squeeze the lifeblood out of that strategy. Fine-tune it so you know the “ins” and “outs”, until you can reproduce those results on demand.

You should be able to reverse-engineer your results whenever you want more leads, sales or any other business metric you can possibly measure!

That’s the surefire formula behind inbound marketing success.

By the way, if you’d like to join a group of real estate marketing powerhouses, we’d welcome you in our free Facebook group.