Digital marketing has transformed the way businesses used to reach out to their customers, thanks to search engines such as Google and Bing. Though every business relies on digital marketing for brand building and reaching out to new customers, there is a huge difference in the success rates. This can be attributed to many reasons, however, an inefficient digital marketing campaign is one of the culprits. Many a time, marketers find it hard to measure the success of the digital marketing projects as there is no standard procedure in place to follow. That said, we discuss a 5-step guide you can follow to measure the success of your digital marketing projects.
1. Document Your Business Objectives
Every business has a different take on digital success depending on the objectives they are trying to achieve. Without having a clear business objective in mind, executing the digital campaign won’t bear any fruit. You should, therefore, outline the business objectives first before even thinking about starting a digital campaign.
Your business objective must be unique and doesn’t need to be in line with your competitors. Finding a real-world objective would surely require more than a few brainstorming sessions with your subordinates and top level management. During the discussion phase, always encourage open discussions with relevant teams and welcome suggestions.
Collating feedback may appear intimidating, however, you can use a simple project management tool for the purpose. Simply create a task to invite suggestions and watch their responses pour in one after the other.
2. State the Key Performance Indicators
After establishing business objectives, it’s time to determine the key performance indicators to achieve them. The KPIs would serve as the metrics to inform you whether your digital efforts are going in the right direction. Assigning a KPI to each business objective would give you a clear, data-driven picture about the success of your digital marketing efforts, which can be further used to identify strengths and weaknesses in your campaign.
You can supply a number of KPIs to meet your specific business objectives. Just make sure your KPIs are not old school. In other words, they shouldn’t be number of clicks, page views, visits or the number of emails received after implementing the campaign.
Instead, tweak the routine KPIs that measure customer engagement, brand loyalty, conversion rate or the economic value generated after the campaign.
3. Track the Customer Journey
Assuming that you implemented a solid digital strategy, you are sure to get traction from multiple channels. Sometimes, one channel would yield more than the rest; which is perfectly alright. Nevertheless, you need to trace the customer path that triggered a specific action. For that to happen, you can create “micro” events and tie them to “macro” ones. The concept of micro and macro events works on the lines of “cause-effect” relationship.
Now, simply measure the micro events and you would get to know your digital actions that actually worked. Someone, for instance, could have dropped a positive comment on your social media page after watching a video or may have signed up for your product after reading a review on a forum.
4. Leverage the Power of Analytics
Now that you have a list of “macro” and “micro” events, it’s time to back on analytics. As there would be limitless micro actions responsible for the macro events, your job is to identify the sweet spot. That said, your sweet spot would be those micro actions that triggered the maximum macros. Tracking all these micro events may appear daunting at once, however, you can be sure about getting incredible results. Once you leverage analytics, you can go ahead with data-driven decisions to strengthen marketing efforts rather than guessing user behavior and sentiments.
5. Evaluate and Improve
Though utilizing analytics is vital to improve your bottom line, you shouldn’t totally give up on your intuition. Ideally, there should be a balance between data-driven and psychological decisions. Keep on testing and exploring new avenues to improve your digital marketing efforts as it’s the only way to keep things moving. Never stop taking suggestions from your team to improve as you never know, when the least expected strategy would turn out to be your best decision ever. As Mcdonald’s founder Ray Kroc quoted, “When you’re green, you are growing. When you’re ripe, you rot.” Your digital campaigns must focus on growth and should never saturate.
Start Streamlining Your Digital Campaigns Today
By adopting the steps mentioned in the blog post, you can get the expected results out of your digital marketing campaigns. Digital marketing is not a one man show; rather, it requires collaboration among teams. For efficient implementation, every step requires brainstorming, multiple discussion and exchanging feedback.
The amount of data that a digital marketing campaign generates can be overwhelming, wherein it becomes hard to comprehend data and delegate responsibilities. As every individual stage progresses, you need to keep a track of the progress and check if any element is hampering your efforts. To ensure a streamlined digital marketing strategy, you can use a simple project management tool. Using a project management too, not only you can coordinate more efficiently among interdependent teams, you can also proactively look out for errors and eliminate them.