Today, numerous entrepreneurs base their digital marketing campaigns on measuring the number of registered users, page reviews, social media followers and mentions. However, what does the rising number of followers on social networks actually tell you? Can such metrics explain who these followers are, how they found out about you, why they even follow you and, most importantly, how they influence your income? Of course not. That’s why they are called vanity metrics and relying on them would nudge your digital marketing strategy in the wrong direction.
Precisely because of this, small businesses need to focus on actionable metrics that will provide them with the information on how effective their marketing efforts really are. By telling you what the main strengths and weaknesses of your business are, they help you make data-driven and unbiased future decisions.
ROI Metrics - Choose Proper Analytics Tools
Measuring your Return on Investment (ROI) is a backbone of every successful digital strategy. By resorting to these metrics, you will be able to monitor and measure almost every segment of you online marketing campaign and determine whether you are getting your money’s worth from it. Depending on what marketing efforts you are planning to asses, there is a wide range of analytics tools you can use for measuring ROI.
For example, if you want to measure the traffic and other crucial information about your website, you should implement website analytics tools such as Google Analytics, HubSpot, Adobe Marketing Cloud and Moz. On the other hand, platforms like Simply Measured, Socialbakers Analytics, Falson Social, Adobe Social or Hootsuite help you assess the effectiveness of your social media marketing strategy.
When chosen properly, any of these analytics tools will enable you to gather invaluable information on what aspects of your digital marketing campaign to improve and, in this way, raise your digital marketing efforts to a higher level.
Analyze All Acquisition Channels
In today’s hyperconnected world, small businesses are provided with an opportunity to market to their target audience through a wide range of channels. However, implementing such channels into your digital marketing campaign is not enough. On the contrary, you need to analyze them in order to find out which ones have the highest customer conversion rates. Only this way will you be able to determine what channels to invest in and what to leave out.
Here, you need to keep track with every single acquisition channel you use to address your target audience, such as blog posts, press releases, paid ads, email marketing campaigns, SEO and SEM practices, partnerships and organic search. Customer acquisition can be monitored and tracked by a myriad of tools, including Google Analytics, KISSmetrics, Mint, Woopra and Clicky.
Additionally, one of the most significant metrics is definitely Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Today, it is small businesses’ paramount to run targeted marketing campaigns, which allows them to observe the transition from a potential customer to a loyal consumer. Referred to as “the only tool that can determine your company’s fate,” CAC simply represents the cost of convincing a potential customer to go with your product or service. Once you determine CAC will you be able to personalize your marketing efforts and adapt them to the customers’ expectations.
Conduct Surveys to Understand Your Customers’ Expectations
To measure your digital marketing performance, you need to pay attention to both its qualitative and quantitative aspects. Qualitative (intangible) metrics include subjective aspects such as emotional relations to a brand or customer satisfaction and, as such, they cannot be measured precisely. On the other hand, quantitative (tangible) metrics are based on sales numbers, revenue generated and customers converted. In order to understand what your customers are really thinking of your digital efforts, you need to analyze both tangible and intangible metrics and one of the most effective ways to do that is through paid surveys. Namely, with numerous sophisticated and yet affordable survey platforms, you will gather the invaluable data and be able to conduct the research on your own. Most importantly, as this option provides them with the opportunity to bring in some extra money, people won’t take these surveys for granted and will be encouraged to answer your questions properly.
Measure Your Content Marketing Efforts
According to some recent studies, 93% of SMBs have employed or are planning to employ at least some of the content marketing strategies. Given this astounding digit, we can easily conclude that this field of marketing is going to dominate the digital ecosystem in years to come. In order to build a solid content marketing strategy, you need to focus on its quantifiable aspects, such as the number of leads and sales from subscribers, content marketing ROI, as well as retention and lifetime value. Each of these metrics can be further analyzed through a number of tools, including Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Scoop.it, Buffer and Addvocate.
Collect Relevant Data
Today, data plays an integral role in measuring a company’s marketing efforts. This way, you will be able to detect a particular problem in your marketing strategy and find the solution to it. Above all, this way, you will increase the effectiveness of your sales and efforts. Here, you need to be focused on every segment of your marketing strategy but also good project management and be able to tell the difference between highly profitable techniques and those that are a waste of time.
Conclusions
A solid digital marketing campaign is the holy grail of your success in this highly competitive market. However, building it is just a half the job done. The other half lies in measuring its efforts properly. Regardless of how complex this process might be, you should consider it as a long-term investment in the future of your small business.
A digital marketer from Sydney. Works as a blogger, Senior Editor for Bizzmark blog and a lecturer at Melbourne University. Tweets industry related articles.
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