You manage what you measure, and thanks to the power of digital advertising and technology, we can now measure every activity and understand the attributed cause of every effect.
Measurement, analysis and constant improvement
Philosophically, contemporary marketing is about continuous learning and optimisation. Due to the efficiency and transparency of digital advertising, marketers can now test and learn with lower risk and almost instantaneous market feedback.
Compare this to the not so distant past where businesses had to go to market via expensive marketing channels and wait to see the results from their TV or print campaign, then loosely attribute their marketing effectiveness to either an uptick or downtick in sales around the timing of their campaign. There was a lot of guesswork applied to uncover if the marketing strategy and execution was effective.
Digital advertising lays it all to bare. There's nowhere to hide, and we can see quite definitively and quickly if a campaign is working or not. Therefore, it's imperative that we define and measure our leading indicators of success and be prepared to pivot to achieve continuous improvement and maximum return on investment.
Today, most forms of digital marketing can track an individual from their first website visit to the last purchase. It can show the complete journey the customer has taken with your brand. From how they got there, what they did when they found you and how engaged they are with your business along the way.
This data can be extraordinarily compelling; however, it can also be overwhelming. Given we have an almost endless supply of data, the issue is focusing on what matters most and creating actionable strategies that move you closer to achieving commercial success.
Popular measures of success
So where should you focus your attention? These are some of the most important measures to pay attention to:
Website sessions
- What was the source of the person’s arrival at the website? – e.g. organic search, social media, paid advertising
- What did they do after they arrived? – e.g. page views, session duration
Leads captured
- How many leads were captured?
- What percentage of website visits became leads?
- What website sources are converting most effectively?
Sales qualified leads
- How many leads did marketing pass to sales that were qualified as a potential customer?
Customers
- How many new customers were won?
- What was the conversion rate from total leads and sales qualified leads?
What’s a broader range of aspects that you can measure and improve?
You can also look at:
- Content, what is resonating with your audience and what's not?
- User experience, are there redundant pages and content on your website?
- The creative campaign, are your ads and marketing messages gaining cut through?
- CTAs, are they effective and creating the desired results?
- Audience targeting, are you attracting the right audience?
How to turn data into clues and insights
The answers to all of these questions create new questions as to why these results occurred. This comes from looking at the journey taken by the most valuable customers and their association with the marketing and sales activity employed to win them.
The important message is to maintain the discipline to look at your data, analyse it in line with your objectives and measures of success, then determine what worked and what can be improved for next time and most importantly, take action. When you truly measure, test and learn, great things happen.
About Poignand ConsultingPoignand Consulting is a strategic marketing and sales enablement consultancy that exists to unlock customer value for your business. We do this by helping enrich the customer experience at every point of contact – from the first seed of awareness, to enquiry, purchase, and the post-sale relationship.
It pays to step back and assess this from time to time. Help is available. If you would like to review your current marketing effectiveness, we would be happy to arrange an obligation-free chat.
