Let me cut straight to the chase because this one is important. Spending money on digital marketing when you’re not measuring and reporting (or worse, when you don’t even know how to do it) means you may as well be handing out fresh R200 notes at the traffic lights.
Seriously, just think about this for a second. Digital, unlike all other marketing, gives you the ability to track every cent, provided you know what to look for. Why are you still wasting good money on Out-of-Home (OOH) Marketing or efforts (which really only helps reinforce a message) when you don’t have a Coca-Cola budget? You can’t afford to be throwing away good money on brand awareness. Is your ideal customer even situated where you’re placing traditional media? What is the real objective you’re aiming to achieve with these efforts?
Vanity metrics given by agencies may look good, but they often don’t make sense of the data and how it fits into the larger strategy. You have to deeply understand the business in order to know what objectives needs to be achieved, what to assess and what to implement. After all, not every touchpoint leads to a final transaction, but it does lead to an interaction but they all feed into the sales funnel.
Always Refer Back to your Digital Strategy
The key thing about “going digital” is having a plan in place. Your team should regularly be assessing the digital landscape and reviewing their findings against your overarching business strategy. Leaning on your online marketing strategy offers a fortune of data to assess, often very detailed, in order to help make informed decisions about your online marketing.
This is how you establish where to be spending your money and efforts. The next thing to focus on is setting up KPIs. Because the digital landscape is measurable, you can establish specific KPIs across all your digital marketing efforts and see what’s working in real time, but more on that further down.
Important KPIs Might Include:
- Top pageviews, downloads, sales funnels and sign-ups
- Dwell time spent on your website.
- Which keyword searches, referrals and traffic sources brought users to your digital properties.
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) - how much those advertising clicks cost you.
And perhaps most importantly, how many clicked through and converted or dropped off
If you consistently measure your various online platforms and channels, you’ll be able to attribute value to these tactics, which enables you to know what’s worth spending your money on in the future. Even with efforts that are purely based on brand awareness or visibility, you need to know what you want first, so you can actually measure it.
Using the Data to Make Decisions that Matter
Data offers two valuable opportunities for your business: it can influence all-new ideas and help direct you for better decision making. Historical information helps identify key trends to use in current and future efforts based off what has worked in the past. This leaves room to experiment when budget allows. Sometimes failing is just as important as positive data in order to find the sweet spot.
Fail Fast, Fix Quick
Measuring is not just something done at the end or beginning of a campaign. Digital allows a far more agile approach to ensuring things are running as they should.
If you’ve spent money on a photoshoot, a model, a stylist, a graphic designer, a skilled copywriter and an expensive billboard on the highway, you’re going to want that image to represent what you need it to and have it resonate with all the “eyeballs” that pass it every day it’s up there. If the copy or image doesn’t grab people, you can’t very well pull it down and try another one.
Unlike traditional marketing, digital is a lot easier to measure and adapt success, for instance you can run an A/B test to ascertain which ad is driving more clicks and then allocating more budget to it. If you run into an issue with a video, it’s a lot simpler to pull it down. If there’s a problem of any kind, voila, just change it.
I get it, there is nothing sexy about measurement and reporting, and for most it’s pretty overwhelming, but there is definitely something exciting about understanding what works against your overall strategy and then seeing a real Return of Investment or Return on Ad Spend. Why not get in touch with us to help figure out what that is for your business?
