What’s your digital marketing strategy worth?
How do you measure the success of your digital marketing strategy? If that question is your prompt to start a 10 minute ramble about reach, engagement and a bunch of other fluffy metrics, then may we politely suggest you hold hard.
Instead, try to answer this question: “Is your digital marketing strategy making you money?”. Can you answer the question honestly and provide numbers that back you up? Do you live in fear of being asked to prove the worth of your digital marketing efforts?
Marketing, and digital marketing especially, should be built around the return on investment (ROI) that you can achieve. You should be constantly tweaking and testing to improve the return on investment. There’s no such thing as a perfect marketing campaign at launch – you can always improve your targeting, messaging and you’ll need robust measurement to do that. In this article, we’ll discuss what you should be measuring, and how you can use this valuable data to improve the results of your digital marketing strategy.
Are you scared by Analytics?
If you’re not regularly using Analytics services, then it’s hard to see how you can be a competent digital marketing professional. Cancel your appointments for the foreseeable and spend get to grips with Google Analytics, Twitter Analytics, the data provided by your email marketing system (you do have one, right?) and the other analytics and data you have access to.
Make sure that you understand the value of everything that happens on your system. If you have an e-commerce system on your website, make sure that it is integrated into Google Analytics so you can see which source of traffic is delivering the most value. There is no value in traffic for traffic’s sake. It could well be the case that one source of traffic is far more valuable than another (for example, there may be a website that is sending you large amounts of high converting traffic – if you never look in Analytics you have no way of knowing this).
You never stop testing
The testing phase of any digital marketing strategy should never end. Even if your marketing campaign is meeting your expectations, why wouldn’t you want it to be even better?
The simplest type of test to run is an A/B test. This means that one set of visitors to your website sees one thing and the other half see another. For example, if you’re A/B testing a form you may show 50% of visitors a form with a video next to it and the other 50% a form with bullet pointed text next to it. After a month you would analyse which group of visitors were most likely to complete the form (and, ideally, how many of them go on to purchase your product). The results will tell you which of the versions to show to all your visitors.
Once you’ve made that decision, start A/B testing something else (for example, the text used on the submit button). A/B testing should be a never ending process of improvement on your website – if you’re not doing it, your digital marketing strategy is flawed.
Never stop changing
Digital marketing is an incredibly fast moving area. If you’re still working with a strategy that worked well 6 or even 3 months ago then you’re being lazy. It’s incredibly likely that something will have changed since then that may have reduced the effectiveness of your strategy. Even if that’s not the case, there may well be a new technique or tool that you should be using.
Ask questions of yourself and your strategy constantly and don’t be satisfied with the easy answers. The better your questions, the more likely you are to succeed.
Want to work with a bunch of digital marketers who really know how to ask the right questions? We’d be delighted to hear from you. Get in touch with us and let us know how we can help you to reach your digital marketing objectives. We measure everything and let you see the numbers – we’re not afraid of the tricky questions! In fact, bring this article along to a meeting. We’ll be ready with the answers!
