Digital marketing successes can be measured by a variety of metrics, which help to identify your performance against the goals and objectives of your company. This can be done manually, or more easily, can be done with an effective analytics platform. Analytics programs can be either free or paid and using more than one at a time can help with the facilitation of measurement. These programs collect, interpret and report data from visitors to your company’s website and social media platforms. With this information, companies can choose whether to change a digital marketing strategy, and overall to understand what’s working and what’s not.
Understanding of the subsets of analytics are what can help you develop the most effective and profit-driving strategies. These subsets include behavioral analytics, customer lifecycle analytics, real-time analytics, social analytics, and more. This information provides understanding of who is reacting to certain digital marketing initiatives and why.
Use of Analytic Programs
Different analytics programs can be used for different aspects of your digital marketing plan. A specific set of programs are tailored for website analytics, social media analytics and SEO analytics. In regard to Website analytics, it is popular to use programs such as Google Analytics, HubSpot, Adobe Marketing Cloud and GoSquared. These monitor presence on your website, provide information on revenues and ROI, and report Web, social and mobile analysis. In terms of SEO, programs such as Moz, RavenTools, and Hubspot are common. These will provide insight on where a company can improve ranking and optimization. Social media platforms such as Simply Measures, Falcon Social and Hootsuite are a few popular examples of how to gain in-depth measurements from various networks. They provide companies with real-time social media performance, social listening and comparative data with competitors.
Completing Goals
One of the hardest, yet most important, aspects of creating a digital marketing campaign is being able to set clear, realistic and authentic marketing goals. Every time a baseball player picks up a ball and want to make a good play, they think of a clear destination for where they want that ball to end up. It is the same for a digital marketing campaign. If a company creates a digital marketing campaign and wants it to be successful, there needs to be a clear end in mind. What does the company want to achieve from the campaign? This is one of the hardest tasks of creating an efficient digital marketing campaign because there is no right answer when it comes to setting goals. Goals must have the proper balance of being challenging yet attainable.
The first step is defining success in the eyes of the company. Does the company want to increase its word of mouth or its revenue? Is it more important to retain customers or gain new ones? Once clear goals are set, a digital marketing strategy can be created as a way to ensure these goals are met.
Measuring ROI
One of the goals of social media is to generate a positive ROI (return on investment), which is a performance measure that evaluates an investment’s efficiency. There are several factors that should be considered when measuring ROI. The first and arguably most “obvious” factor to measure is the sales volume, but it is a complex measurement, due to the variety of ways to measure: during the campaign, post campaign, or overall retention of increased volume. The second factor is evaluating social media interaction; the more reactive you are on social media, the more successful your campaign will be. Keeping social media “current” helps to gain contacts, but being interactive over a long period of time will help to deliver a positive ROI. Another thing to consider are the external factors which may affect your campaign initiative, such as socio-economic factors, political instability, the competitive market environment, seasonality and inclimate weather.
Determining the effectiveness of a digital marketing campaign is important, as it can save your company money. Investing in a marketing campaign is only worth the money and time if it is helping meet the company’s goals. Having tools and procedures to measure digital marketing campaign effectiveness will help every company in the long run!