Looking closely into all the requirements of your business is the first step to a successful online marketing strategy. The effectiveness of a marketing strategy is often offset by the failure to measure up what is actually required. This is why it is the chief marketing officer’s job to tackle questions of efficiency for the best results. Here are some ways to determine how successful your current online marketing strategy is.
What sort of campaigns are you running?
There are many different marketing campaigns with different success rates, depending on the type of company, customers, products and other contributing factors. With marketing campaigns, social media campaigns, online advertising campaigns, etc. it is imperative that you question your campaign before going forward.
How to measure your campaigns’ effectiveness
The ultimate goal for a successful online marketing campaign is complete self-sustainability. If you lack a proper digital marketing tactic, you could lose out on online customers, online market shares, online value propositions and valuable resources such as time and money. You could also lose out on opportunities for improvement and optimization. Thus, you should measure the effectiveness of your campaign to fixed goals and achievements. You can do this by comparing your success against that of your competitors and evaluate your growth accordingly. You can also ask yourself questions on the brands strategies of growth, value proposition and marketing channels that are presently being under-utilized by your business.
What tools are used to measure the ROI of campaigns?
Return on investment (ROI) can be taken as proof of a successful marketing plan and can be measured easily with a couple of effective tools. Metrics that can assist in measuring ROI from social media and other platforms include:
- Conversation goals: You need to determine targets for online purchases, newsletters, contact forms, interaction on social media, etc.
- Reach: Track reach (the total number of people/households you can potentially reach via advertising or promotional campaigns).
- Traffic: Check which strategies are more successful by measuring referral sources through Google Analytics.
- Leads: Be aware of traffic from websites and blogs that are transformed into leads. Be sure to focus on bounce rate, average page views and average time on the website.
- Customers: Keep track of customer conversations by checking leads. Also take the rate of return visitors to a website into account when determining the effectiveness and popularity of a site.
- Costs: The cost per lead or the cost to attain customers is an important factor. It can be measured dividing marketing and advertising costs by new paying customers in that time period.
- Conversation rates: Keep an account of the online traffic percentage from leads.
- Audits: Social media audits can be very helpful, although you can also use contact forms, emails, etc.
- A/B Tests: This will be discussed in detail below.
How to identify the effectiveness of campaigns by running A/B tests
When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of your online marketing campaign, A/B tests are without a doubt one of the best ways to do it. Statistics show that only 28% of marketers are satisfied with their conversion rates. Of course A/B testing is a very good way of testing out the kinks in marketing. To do this, you need to decide what to test, choose treatment and control mechanisms, and then create a test, promote it, gather data, and then finally analyse it (or just use one of the pre-existing ones).
Targets
As previously stated, identifying the key targets is the first step of the process. Here you should usually set two primary goals and two secondary goals. These goals must be specific to your company, easy to attain, comply with the needs of the hour and above all, it must be ethical.
Objectives
Setting marketing objectives is a great way of homing down on goals. By determining certain metrics of measurements, you can keep track of goals and accomplishments more effectively. For example, if the objective is to increase your sales, you will require a rubric that defines a successful target. Objectives can be defined under relevancy, time and measurability indexes for ideal results.
Identification
Beyond the identifications of objectives and goals, it is vital to know a target consumer group’s demographics and profiles. For example, a youth-orientated program could work better with social network advertising, while a more mature group would be better reached via email marketing strategies. When creating the optimal online strategy, the target customer profile is essential.
Market Identifiers
One of the biggest problems regarding online marketing strategies is that they fall short of that of competing businesses. One must always stay up to date with the strategies of competitors, and counter if required. For example, Amazon may do extensive email marketing during the holiday seasons. Thus Amazon’s worthy competitors will be aware of this and conduct their own strategy as to not be overshadowed.
Platforms
On Sundays, Facebook users are 32% more active on social media.
Consider your target group when deciding whether to advertise on LinkedIn, Facebook or twitter. Also be sure to post at the correct time. For instance on Sundays, Facebook users are 32% more active on social media than on any other day, with the best posting time being between 12pm and 1pm.
Content Strategies
Along with a competent marketing strategy you also need a good content strategy. There are three important ideas behind this – content type, time of day, and the amount of posts per day/week.
Marketing Techniques
In spite of the immense benefits, this is one of the most underrated parts of online marketing. An online strategy can easily come short of its potential when there are no tracking measures. On the other hand, through tracking measures, improvements can be conveyed in segments that require them. This is discussed in greater detail below.
How to track marketing techniques
This allows potential communication links with your customers and creates a better chance for retention. For example, a feedback form can be an important part of tracking the success of a marketing strategy. Below are some more options:
- Send forms via email to thank visitors for stopping by and attach a couple of non-mandatory question (a filing system would be good for noting any responses).
- Create opportunities for client feedback with online comment forms.
- Track conversations and enable actionable metrics.
A successful online marketing strategy is based on various metrics including the medium of advertising, target group, and consequent testing mechanisms. The process is growing constantly and changing with time which makes it essential to continuously adapt. However, while keeping these pointers in mind, any marketing consultant or CMO can identify the ways of tracking online marketing effectiveness. Therefore, they can also discover parameters with which they can align business goals and help their businesses grow further.