You know your website and social media presence should deliver powerful marketing. They are your billboards shown around the world. They can build relationships with new customers. They can reach and interact with your precise target audience. They can motivate your target audience to take actions that advance your business stronger than any of your marketing strategies.
But how can you measure success? What should your digital marketing team or marketing agency partner be reporting so you know your marketing strategies are effective?
The powerful measurement tools available to digital marketers mean you can know whether your online programs are delivering the goods. Determining that requires knowing what to look at and what you should expect.
1. Think about the business objectives for your website.
- Are you building brand awareness and name recognition?
- Do you want to generate revenue?
- Do you want to generate leads?
- Do you want to build brand loyalty and an authentic community?
2. Communicate your objectives to your digital marketing team.
Ask them about their strategies to address your specific business objectives. Then request they provide metrics for your objectives.
Building your brand or name recognition means you should see rising numbers of website visitors, social media followers, and engagement across channels over time. You need to calculate Customer Acquisition Cost by quantifying how many visitors you need to generate for every sale or lead, and the average value of that sale or lead.
E-Power Marketing’s White Paper “6 Metrics Your Boss Actually Cares About” fills you in on the details. The paper also provides other formulas to determine the value of your digital marketing and justifications for budgeting, such as Lifetime Customer Value.
If you are selling off your website or through other websites, you can directly measure revenue generated and profit. These are guideposts to determining a sound business investment in growing online sales.
Leads generated need to be qualified as you will certainly receive plenty of no-value spam no matter what you do to slow it down. Following through on how much revenue is generated from qualified leads will quantify the ROI of your digital marketing.
Customer loyalty is reflected in return visits, page views, and social media engagement. What is your Lifetime Customer Value?
3. How much growth should you expect?
As with all marketing programs, numbers go up and down from month-to-month and are impacted by seasonal factors and trends. Generally, year-over-year numbers are better measurements.
There are so many factors that impact how much growth you should expect. If your program recently ramped up, you do need to give it time to deliver its potential. How much did you increase resources and budget? Did you see a commensurate amount of growth after six months or a year? How much more aggressive have your competitors been? Are your numbers going up as rapidly as your market is growing? Are you meeting your business goals?
If you are not seeing the growth you deserve or expect, then you should demand answers from your digital team or agency. What are their reasons for the shortcomings? Are they excuses or possibly valid reasons?
If they say they lack the resources or the budget, then you better get out the spreadsheet and make some calculations. What is your digital marketing Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)? What is the Lifetime Customer Value compared with your digital CAC? Your calculations may justify increasing your digital marketing budget, or they may well identify that your digital marketing program is underperforming.
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