HubSpot Debuts Marketing Grader, a Cool New Assessment Tool

HubSpot just made available a new free tool called Marketing Grader that offers a detailed assessment of your online marketing efforts. The tool is an upgrade for HubSpot's five-year-old Website Grader and is more comprehensive. 

Marketing Grader is fast and easy. Simply plug in your website’s address, and if you like, the urls of two of your competitors, and Marketing Grader will generate a score from 0 to 100, like a Klout score for your online marketing efforts.

Scroll down the results page, and Marketing Grader will provide a fairly detailed analysis of what is working and lacking in three key areas: Top of the Funnel, Middle of the Funnel, and Analytics, including assessments of your SEO, mobile, social media efforts, and more.

Marketing Grader offers tidbits like how often your company was mentioned on Twitter in the last 24 hours, how many fans your business page has, and how many of your last 10 tweets were replies to somebody else.

Your results will include tips and suggestions on how to improve your marketing, such as a list of Top 3 Things To Do, with suggestions like:

1. Get more inbound links to your website.
2. Tweet more frequently.
3. Reply to individuals on Twitter to be more conversational.

Marketing Grader’s results mix general marketing observations with a sprinkling of survey data. For example it tells you that “Creating, optimizing, and promoting content are keys to filling the top of your sales and marketing funnel with more website traffic and leads” and complements this bit of advice with, “The good news is that companies who create, optimize and promote their blogs get 55% more traffic and 70% more leads than those who don't.”

Using Marketing Grader is fascinating and fun, although its assessments may miss the mark in certain areas (for example, telling you to work on converting leads to sales, even if you don’t sell anything on your site), and you may take issue with any number of the results you receive. Overall, Marketing Grader provides a general barometer of your marketing that you should find interesting and useful.

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