Today, investing in at least some form of digital marketing is a necessity for any business that wants to get noticed in a highly competitive digital marketing ecosystem. They usually invest in conversion-boosting tactics like social networking, creating killer content, and paid advertising. However, there is yet another immensely important element they usually forget and that’s monitoring their online performance.
Setting clear goals and auditing your major KPIs regularly gives you the opportunity to identify the major strengths and weaknesses of your digital marketing campaign, understand your target audience’s preferences, build a strong online reputation, and tailor your marketing tactics to the industry trends.
Here is how to monitor your digital marketing performance.
Set clear business objectives.
When building a digital marketing campaign from scratch, your goal is to get everyone involved in the brainstorming process. First off, you need to come up with numerous ideas for your new campaign. At this point, you need to set your company’s goals and determine what it is that you’re trying to accomplish that month, quarter, or year. These initial objectives may be broad, but they’re the foundation on which you build your entire digital marketing strategy.
Then, you need to set clear marketing goals and see how marketing can help you achieve the desired results. Use the SMART goal setting principle, meaning that your goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. For example, if your company’s main aim is to increase sales, what’s the goal of your digital marketing campaign? Is it boosting brand awareness, driving more traffic to the top of the funnel, or enhancing your conversion funnel? It’s important to emphasize that the digital marketing goals vary from one business to the other. Most importantly, these goals determine the steps you’ll take when planning and executing your campaign.
Finally, you need to see how to implement different aspects of digital marketing (SEO, email marketing, social media marketing) to make these goals work. For instance, to boost your brand awareness, you need to publish high-quality content, humanize your brand on social networks, and build great links.
Identify your target segments.
Once you set clear goals for your digital marketing campaign, you need to research your market segments. Simply put, your target segments are the groups of people you want to market your products or services to. This is one of the most important moves you need to make. Namely, many businesses decide to go with a broad, uniform approach to reach as many leads as possible. Unfortunately, casting your net too wide is never a good option, as it doesn’t let you focus on the people that are really interested in your products.
To hook their attention and turn them into paying customers, you need to segment them strategically and build buyer personas. This will help you understand their needs, preferences, expectations, and problems and tailor your marketing campaign to them.
Here, social networks are your invaluable asset. Apart from offering amazing targeting opportunities, they also allow you to listen to your customers’ discussions and learn what groups of people are really interested in what you have to offer. Google AdWords is also a great option, especially for local businesses, as it offers outstanding geotargeting options.
Establish your main KPIs.
Before implementing your digital marketing campaign, you need to choose the right KPIs to track. These are the metrics that should keep you on track and let you identify your performance against the goals you’ve set. Most importantly, they allow you to detect the major weaknesses of your strategy and eliminate them on time. Here are a few vital KPIs you should track:
- Traffic metrics, such as traffic sources, total site visits, the number of new visitors vs. the number of returning ones, time on site, mobile traffic, bounce rates, exit rates, etc.
- Conversion metrics like total conversions, conversion funnel rates, click-through rates, and cost per conversation.
- Revenue metrics, such as cost per acquisition, ROI, or value per visit.
Sure, choosing the right KPIs depends on your business’ goals. Once you set them, you should set specific targets for each of your metrics. These targets are usually industry standards that help you see your performance and measure your results in quantifiable terms. Your digital marketing KPIs let you monitor how your campaign develops over time, as well as detect the major pain points and prevent them from hurting your online image.
Choose the right digital marketing tools.
Monitoring your digital marketing campaign’s performance manually is possible, but it’s neither practical nor precise enough. To save your time and get the most out of your stats, you need to invest in reliable digital marketing tools.
Let’s say you want to invest in an SEO tool to track your website performance. In this case, tools like Google’s Webmaster Tools, Screaming Frog SEO, or Moz will help you audit your site thoroughly. Ahrefs and SEMrush are perfect for a detailed keyword research, while tools like BuzzStream will scan your backlink portfolio and notify you of any suspicious links. Now, to stay on top of different aspects of your SEO strategy, you need to use multiple tools if using multiple tools at a time. This is where SEO reporting tools shine, as they integrate with your SEO platforms and allow you to monitor your major KPIs from one place, without having to open each SEO tool individually.
When choosing the marketing tools, do your research first to understand their major features and goals. Even the priciest tool won’t work for you if it doesn’t meet your business needs.
Take actionable steps based on your stats.
Remember that investing in a tool is only half the job done. Once you get the data you need, you can now make adjustments to your digital marketing campaign and tailor it to your target market’s requirements. Even though things in digital marketing change fast and require you to take immediate action, this doesn’t mean you should get overly excited with every piece of data you collect. Instead, keep monitoring your stats regularly, compare them and make strategic, data-backed decisions.
Measuring the performance of your digital marketing strategies is a must.
As the global digital population is expanding at an astounding pace, not investing in some form of digital marketing is just like running a race with a wooden leg. Without a perfectly optimized website or a strong social media campaign, you would miss out on an opportunity to market to wider audiences, build an authoritative brand, and rise above your competition.
Still, keep in mind that you’re not the only one investing in digital marketing. To rise above the competition, remove the guesswork, and focus your campaigns on actual data, you should track your performance regularly. And, I hope you’ll find these tips useful!
How do you monitor the performance of your digital marketing campaign?
