No strategy in the world is useful to you if you don’t know whether or not it is getting you to where you want to be. If you’re working out every day to lose weight, you will stand on the weighing scale at some point to see if it’s doing you any good. If you’re studying hard to get good at a subject, you will take some form of test to evaluate yourself. If your company has a Digital Marketing Strategy in place, you will want to measure it… somehow.
But wait, how do you even know if your strategy is giving you the right results? And what even are the right results for your company? And how do you even measure it?
And… well, you get the picture: result-driven digital marketing strategies are not a walk in the park.
But don’t worry; it’s not that hard once you know what you’re doing. And to know that you’re doing, let’s start with the basics:
What is Result-Driven Digital Marketing Strategy?
While the term is pretty self-explanatory, but let’s just give it a solid definition for the sake of this blog post. So a ‘Result-Driven Digital Marketing Strategy’ means a digital marketing strategy that is focused on outcomes and achievements. This strategy will not only allow you to generate ROI (as every strategy should), it will also give you the tools you need to show how you generated it.
In this strategy, you will know exactly how much of your resources you need, whether or not your plan is delivering the expected results, and what you can do to improve those results…
…granted that you are using this strategy in the right way.
How to Devise a Result-Driven Digital Marketing Strategy?
If you don’t have a result-driven digital marketing strategy, there are a few things you will have to tweak in your current strategy and your mindset as a whole, starting with your perception. Instead of thinking of marketing as a department in your organization to which you charge costs, make it that part of your business where you allocate your resources; put efficiency second on your priority list and start focusing on more relevant KPI’s.
Now, you don’t have to panic; you don’t have to make these changes overnight; it is a long process but slowly and steadily, this is the kind of business mindset you should look to achieve.
1. Define Your Goals
The reason you create any strategy is to achieve some sort of goal. In a result-driven strategy, defining the right goals is even more important because you will be defining your company’s success based on these goals. This is also why being measurable and achievable are two important requisites you should consider while defining your business goals. The business objectives you decide on should motivate your team along with being a measurable benchmark.
To understand how to choose and define the right goals, you can take a deep dive into understanding the OKR System.
2. Choose the Right KPIs
This step is a little bit tricky since you can’t simply pick up KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) from a competitor and apply it to your strategy. Each company is different, and no matter how similar your business is to your competitors, your past data and goals will differ in some way or the other. I have and the effects they can have on your website. This is why measuring your success using your competitors KPIs is a risky business since it will most likely give you a false image of your company’s success.
For example, if your competitor is using bounce rate to weed out some of their design-related issues, you cannot use this KPI if the problem you’re looking to tackle is related to traffic distribution.
3. Analyze Past Data
Gathering and analyzing past data is just as important to a result-driven digital marketing strategy as defining the right goals. Why? Because one of the best ways to measure the success of current goals is if you compare it to past data.
Even here, gathering the right kind of data is important, mostly because the alternative is a gross waste of resources. Another reason why you should focus on gathering only specific historical data is that it will streamline your process in the sense that you will not have to scramble around to match your KPIs with your past data.
If gathering and analyzing historical data manually proves to be too taxing, you can always use tools like Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager.
4. Research Your Market
This step is one that has been repeated so many times in so many digital marketing-related blog posts that it can be considered cliché at this point. But no matter how often it is talked about, it is still a relevant and important step that is not skippable.
‘Researching your market’ does not mean simply skimming through social media and calling it a day. For an effective result-driven strategy, you will have to go through research papers relating to your business, understand the recent and emerging trends in digital marketing, taking a deep dive into your target audience, shadowing your competitors, and so much more.
It may sound overwhelming and taxing, but it really does pay off in the long run.
5. Profile Your Competitors
While researching your market, you will have to shadow your competitors. This is a really good chance to gather some information to create a ‘competitor’s profile’. This profile will include but are not limited to things like their marketing tactics, pricing, etc. You should also look into which of their products or services are being exposed to which kinds of market.
Profiling your competitors is an important part of your strategy because even if it doesn’t directly affect your results, it will help you create a competitive advantage and allow you to pinpoint exactly how your brand stands out among others.
Another major benefit is that creating a competitor’s profile will help you avoid the mistakes they made and learn from their achievements.
6. Keep Your Resources in Check
No matter how big or how small your company is, in the end, you only have limited resources that you need to allocate to different parts of your organization; marketing cannot take up a major chunk of your budget no matter how good the results are.
So it is vital that you keep a check on your resources and find the best ways to use the available resources as optimally as you can. Go for free alternatives of expensive tools, create lesser, but more effective social media posts, and allocate a specific day or hour towards filling out spreadsheets.
Conclusion
Building up a result-driven digital marketing strategy is a tedious job but it becomes easier and less daunting once you know what you’re doing. Really, the secret to a successful strategy is to make a plan and not stick to it. Sounds weird? Well, it’s not because what it really means is that you should make a plan that is as dynamic and flexible as possible. This way you don’t have to worry about changing every aspect of it every time a new trend comes up. This not only helps reduce and possibly negate wastage of resources, but it also saves you a major headache, which is the point of having a result-driven digital marketing strategy in the first place.
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