If you run a digital advertising agency, you are probably familiar with the difficulty of establishing the effectiveness of what you do for your clients. You are asking your clients to spend a lot of money to develop content marketing campaigns, and they are going to expect results. The difficulty lies in identifying the best ways to measure and report results.
Setting Expectations
You are an expert in getting results on the web. You can generate Internet traffic, increase page views, enhance engagement on social media, build an email list and many other critical activities. Your clients many not understand the value of all these activities. They want to see a good return on their investment. Clients could care less about page views; they ultimately want to see increases in sales and revenue for their business.
Integrating Business Goals
Before you start setting up marketing strategies for your clients, you need to sit down with them and understand their business goals. They are hiring you to help meet these goals, so you want to be specific about what they are hoping to achieve with your help. For example, a business goal may be to build brand awareness. Another business goal will be to increase sales and revenue. Yet another goal could be to generate new leads.
Once you identify and prioritize the business goals of your client, you can identify the key performance indicators that will tell you whether you are achieving these goals. By tracking these KPIs over time, you can show your clients that their business goals are being met. Monthly reports on KPIs are a great way to show the client that your strategies are effective.
Bridging the Gap Between KPIs and Goals
There are a wide variety of metrics that agencies can track for their clients digital marketing campaigns. The key is matching these key performance indicators to business goals. If you tell your client that their page views have increased by 3% this month, this means nothing. But if you tell them that page views are an important part of brand awareness, the client can see that they are meeting their business goal. Here are some examples of how key performance indicators match up with business goals:
Build Brand Awareness:
Many client want to promote their brand. They hope that by positioning themselves as a trusted expert in their field, that people will turn to them to solve problems. Content that builds brand awareness is effective when more people engage with it. Agencies should track overall traffic to the website, page views of specific pages, downloads of white papers and ebooks, social mentions and links back to content.
Engagement is another important business goal.
Engagement customers are loyal to the business brand and return for repeat business. They also promote the brand to their connections. Engagement can be measured by social activity online. Comments, likes and shares on social media demonstrate engagement.
Lead Generation:
Many companies are looking to increase the number of leads that they capture from their digital marketing. This goal can be measured by the number of time people fill out forms on the webpage. It is also measured by email and blog subscriptions as well as the conversion rate of leads to customers. Since most businesses have multiple ways of generating leads, lead attribution is going to be important. It is critical that your client identify the initial point of contact so that the effectiveness of the various marketing channels can be measured. This is especially important for mobile marketing where prospects may use the touch dialing feature to initiate a call from the website itself. These lead should be attributed to the mobile marketing strategy and not to other forms of advertising.
Sales:
Many clients are interested in the bottom line. They want to see increases in sales. This is fairly easy to track. The difficulty is similar to lead generation. You have to attribute each sale to a particular marketing source. You want to track both online sales and offline sales. In addition, you should get reports from salespeople and customers about the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
The key to establishing the effectiveness of your digital marketing is to relate your metrics to the business goals of your client. When this happens, you can demonstrate how your efforts are producing desired results for your clients.
