If you’re like us, you have probably created more than a few campaigns that made you proud. But, do you know the overall return on investment (ROI) of each digital marketing strategy?
Measurement is a powerful tool marketer’s use to demonstrate the effectiveness of their campaigns. If you haven’t yet taken advantage of the benefits of data (or you need a refresher), these simple steps will get you started.
Establish Goals for your Digital Marketing Strategy
Setting a goal will create a target for you to shoot for. For example, are you trying to raise awareness or increase revenue?
Or, you may have a SMART goal, such as increasing total page views by 10 percent in three months.
A SMART goal is:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Realistic
- Timely
Once you’ve established your goal, you’ll be able to align everything with your digital marketing strategy.
Define your Target Audience
One of the keys to inbound marketing is understanding who your campaigns are trying to reach. The exercise of creating buyer personas — semi-fictional representations of your ideal client — is an effective way to segment your audience.
Then, you can build a brand strategy that focuses on addressing those specific people’s challenges and pain points.
Understand the Buyer’s Journey
Since some potential customers may just be browsing, while others are ready to buy, there are different types of content that works best at one of three stages of the buyer’s journey. For example, a case study might work best for a lead in the decision stage.
Inbound marketing gives you the ability to target consumers, and then measure the effectiveness of different pieces of tailored content, including blogs, social posts and remarketing ads.
Map Objectives to Key Performance Indicators
Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are a way to document the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy. They can track each marketing element’s performance over a given period of time, which offers you the ability to review and later refine your campaigns.
The KPIs you use will differ depending on your goal. For example, an awareness campaign would look closely at overall webpage visitors, while a customer retention campaign might examine social media marketing engagement.
Key performance indicators for awareness:
- First-time visitors
- Organic search growth
- Social media follower growth
Key performance indicators for sales:
- Email subscriptions
- Content downloads
- Contact form conversion rate
Analyze Your Data
Once you have gathered all this valuable data, you can track your campaign’s effectiveness with monitoring tools like Google Analytics and HubSpot. These results can be compared and contrasted to show you what has performed well and what needs improvement.
After analysis, you can reassess your digital marketing strategy and begin the process again armed with more knowledge and experience than ever before.
