If there is one thing that I’ve learned about Digital Marketing, it is that you must act fast to correct what’s not working in your online campaigns.
You may be investing a small portion or a big chunk of your marketing budget on digital campaigns to generate business. How do you ensure you are seeing the real results and not just the data made up of likes, engagement, or followers?
Although digital marketing is data-driven, it’s also tricky to connect the dots and find out the real return-on-investment that can justify the spend. The outcome you want to see from your efforts is an increase in the top-line revenue and acquisition of long-term customers.
That’s why I focus on Agility! And I highly recommend a quarterly analysis of your digital marketing results and the outcome reflected on your sales pipeline.
The exercise to connect the dots between marketing activity and sales output may look something like this:
First – You review the data from the campaigns from all the channels – Consolidate and analyze the results from SEO, Ads, social media, email, and any other online marketing activity. Get the exact numbers and related values for the quarter.
Second – Check your Google Analytics dashboard to match the accuracy of the results.
Next – Ask the sales team to share a report of new customers acquired during the quarter. Can you attribute the success of the customer acquisitions to any of your digital marketing activities? (This can be tricky and will vary as per the nature of your business). Attribution models have gone through tremendous change with multiple customer touchpoints. But if you have the right tracking in place, you should be able to trace the customer journey and identify how you acquired the new customer.
After that – Create a report of Leads/prospects in your Leads funnel. Identify the potential revenue in the near future.
Finally – It’s time to connect the dots.
Placing the sales and marketing data side by side will help you evaluate the cost of running campaigns and the sales opportunity or revenue you generate. If the cost of marketing is almost double that of the gains, you need to assess the efficacy of your marketing campaigns, revisit audience profiling and reposition the message to connect with your audience.
The key is to identify any problem early on and act speedily, and creatively to fix the issues – be it the ad creative, incorrect audience targeting or just mismanagement of the campaign.
I hope you can put this plan into action as Q3 soon comes to a close. Then you can assess and reposition your campaigns for the final quarter of the year.
Until Next Time,
Suchi
