How to Measure Digital Marketing Effectiveness

Measuring digital marketing campaigns is one of those things that we marketers have to do, to analyze returns, justify budgets, and to drive company growth. It’s a way to prove value and also to get to know better the people we communicate to. It’s critical to business development and simultaneously a key part in customer growth process.

Be SMART: Define Goals and Priorities For Your Business

Setting SMART goals means you can clarify your ideas, focus your efforts, use your time and resources productively, and increase your chances of achieving what you want for your business. Being SMART ensure your goals are clear and reachable.

But…what’s SMART goals?

Specific – goals have to be simple, sensible, significant and undoubtedly;

Measurable – goals need to be quantifiable;

Achievable –beyond attainable, goals also have to be agreed by all those involved;

Relevant – goals also have to be reasonable, results-based and realistic, so they can be accomplished through the available resources;

Time-Based – Last but not least goals need to be time limited, time/cost limited, timely, time-sensitive and have reasonable deadlines for being achieved and to not generate demotivation or disturbing on work rhythm: not too short, not too long.

Define Buyer Personas and Market Segments

By defining buyer personas you have a chance to know better the people you intend to communicate with. How? By profiling your potential buyers around demographics, behaviors and psychology with relevant information, so you can adjust communication.

As there are different services and products, for different people, with different needs, different market segments can be defined. Identifying and creating buyer profiles according to segments allows you to communicate more efficiently with each of them.

Understanding the Buyer’s Journey

To successfully understand the buyer’s journey, first put yourself in customer's mind and try to understand how you would initiate a search for a service or product. Find out the most suitable channels and what decision criteria would you consider in order to buy. Align communication and content with buyer’s journey, so that can be relevant and useful.

Measure, Evaluate & Optimize

Measure your performance against key business objectives by defining your Key Performance Indicators (KPI's). You can use KPI's at multiple levels to evaluate your success at reaching targets. High-level KPI's may focus on the overall performance of the enterprise, while low-level KPI's may focus on processes in departments such as sales, marketing or call center.

If you want to perceive web visitors inflow you can rely on traffic metrics. Otherwise, if your intention is to generate more visitors make use of traffic sources, channels with highest potential and conversion metrics.

You’re not reaching the goals? Try to deeply understand data in order to detect what and where to improve.

You’re reaching the goals? There’s always room for some improvement.

To retain: Measuring the entire buyer’s journey and its behaviors – since visitors to customers – and the whole buying funnel it’s crucial to keep achieving better results.

Choose the Right Technology and Software Platform

Before you can select the best software platform, you must understand your company’s long-term vision. Only then you can be sure that the chosen software will help achieve organizational goals. This vision will help you determine the need for additional resources, cross-training personnel, and updated computer hardware and infrastructure.

Some questions to ask as you document and clarify objectives:

• What do we hope to achieve as the end goal by investing in this technology?
• How is this approach better than our current process or technology?
• What processes or roles will change as a result of this software?
• What are the time and resource considerations that come into play?

Later in the product selection process, knowing the company’s objectives will help you focus software and supplier evaluations. Consider different features, as integration with other platforms and applications, and make sure the chosen platform gives you reliable access to information.

Define What You Need to Monitor

With terms like “big data” and “data-driven marketing” being thrown around daily it’s no wonder that digital marketers can easily get confused about what they should be measuring, how to measure it and what they should be doing with the data. In order to make accurate decisions you need to clearly define the reports and information you need to analyze.

Reports, business goals and metrics must be all aligned, so they can be analyzed periodically in order to ensure that you’re on the right track for business improvement. Based on reports, you can adjust measures and make important decisions that can immediately influence the business course.

Measuring effectiveness is transversal to all company’s departments and areas. For example, if you want to measure and improve the sales team effectiveness, Sales Enablement gives you tools which will make all the difference on sales team management and productivity. 

Want to know more? Watch the webinar recording: "Sales Enablement: How to Improve Your Sales Team’s Productivity”

Topics: Digital Marketing, Marketing

Also very important to keep the sales team motivated is to send them many (great) leads. For that, the process starts at the top of the marketing funnel, when lead generation is the focus.