How to create your inbound growth stack

So you are doing growth marketing and you are in charge of designing and implementing your acquisition stack, this article is made for you. Please note that this article will cover only the inbound part of your marketing stack. In a second article we will describe how to design your outbound stack.

Design principles

We assume that you are using a stack that looks like that:

Paid advertising: Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Linkeding Ads, Twitter Ads...

Website: Wordpress, Drupal, Webflow, Custom made website...

CRM: Hubspot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Custom Made CRM

Issues with this stack

One of the key issue using this stack is that you are using a lot of tools that are totally disconnected from each other making is hard to understand what marketing channel is performing better than the other. Indeed you can get the number of clicks or impressions from your acquisition tools but it usually stops there. The good news for you is that there is a solution no matter what tool you use. Let's see how this works

Using UTMs in your advertising campaign

You need to bridge the gap between your ads and your traffic on your website, for that you need to use Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters. UTM are parameters from your URL that can be read by your website and can be understood by a human being. It looks like this:

https://www.example.com/page?utm_content=buffercf3b2&utm_medium=social&utm_source=snapchat.com&utm_campaign=buffer

utm_source

Identifies which site sent the traffic, and is a required parameter. For example utm_source=google.

utm_medium

Identifies what type of link was used, such as cost per click or email. Social, Organic, Paid, Email, Affiliates, are all core marketing channels that include multiple traffic sources. For instance, utm_medium=cpc.

utm_campaign

Identifies a specific product promotion or strategic campaign. For instance, utm_campaign=spring_sale

utm_term

Identifies search terms. Example, utm_term=running+shoes.

utm_content

Identifies what specifically was clicked to bring the user to the site, such as a banner ad or a text link. It is often used for A/B testing and content-targeted ads. For example, utm_content=logolink or utm_content=textlink.

Don't worry in most advertising you can use Macros to fill them directly, or you can use this tool from Google to create them manually. We recommend you to have a spreadsheet with all the UTMs generated so you can follow up what is used and where to guaranty the unicity. Once your UTMs are generated we can skip to the next step, how do we decipher them.

Linking your UTMs to your lead information

Depending on the technology your CRM is running on, you'll find different ways of doing it.

Using UTMs in Hubspot

Good news, if you are running on Hubspot CRM, it is fairly easy to get your Lead information associated with your UTMs. In order to do so you need to follow two simple steps:

Set up the Hubspot tracking code: This tracking code will help you get access to your lead visit on your website. In order to do it you need to follow this guide.

Set up a Hubspot Form: Hubspot allow you to create custom form that you can style the way you want so they can look like they are part of your website. They will automatically create a Contact and associate it with the UTMs that Hubspot has detected with the tracking code. You can set up a custom form using this guide.

Using UTMs with Salesforce, Pipedrive or a custom CRM

When you rely on those solutions you need to be a little be more tech savvy to get your UTMs in your CRM. In order to do so you will need to extract all the UTMs when your lead get on your website, you will store it as a cookie and when your lead will submit your form you will send along the UTMs parameters in your CRM. You want your UTMs information in your CRM so that everybody is aligned with where your lead is coming from.

On all pages on your website you will need to put this script in the header of your page.

Then on your form page you need to include the following form

Using the result of the form you can create your lead with all your marketing attribution information.

How to do reporting on those data

Once you have linked your marketing information in your CRM database you can start creating reporting. With a tool like Whaly we will connect to your Facebook Ads, Google ads and CRM database and extract all the needed information. This will allow you to create a report to understand in real time:

• Which channel has the best ROI
• What is your CPL (cost per lead)
• What is your CAC (cost acquisition cost)
• What is your CAC / LTV ratio (Customer acquisition cost / Lifetime value)
• ...

Conclusion

Getting access to marketing data is hard but is worthwhile, this will allow you to share relevant information between your sales and marketing team and make them work hand in hand. On a broader side, this will help you measure key indicators that will benefit your whole business.