Digital Marketing: Don't Set It and Forget It

Here are 6 checkpoints you can use to evaluate your current digital marketing strategy and establish whether it is still on track. Most of the time, Digital Strategies require adjustments over time. Messages may need to be refreshed. Images may need to be changed. New challenges may have appeared in the competitive landscape that need to be addressed. There are many changes in your business environment that require adjustments in your digital (and offline) strategy.

Here are 6 important signs you can track that will tell you what kinds of changes are needed:

1. Your lead numbers and their quality are going down.
   Monthly raw leads into your CRM or website acquisition forms are an important marker of the relevance of your messaging to your target audience. If your lead numbers used to be satisfying and now are not, you need to audit the elements on your digital strategy that connect you to your customers. These can include: your customer acquisition experience, messaging, imaging, and your offer. The proper course of action is to make a detailed audit of acquisition channels and set up a clear report showing their performance over time. With this information in hand, plus whatever anecdotal information your staff can provide, it is possible to build a picture of potential changes to your strategy to improve performance in terms of lead numbers and quality. (Numbers to track: Lead Numbers, Conversion Percentage)
   
   
2. The website or social media traffic is low quality. This means that the audience that you are getting through your web presence is not engaging with your content and is not connecting with your product/services offer. An engaged audience usually transforms into a purchasing audience over time (I can't emphasize enough the time factor involved). Proper content, refreshed regularly, and delivered clearly over both desktop and mobile platforms, helps create this engagement and helps deliver quality prospects over time. (Numbers to track: Bounce rates on website pages, low traffic from social media to conversion pages, time spent on the website, number of pages read on the website).
   
   
3. Paid advertising is not delivering results. This means that the click-through rate in the ads has diminshed, and/or that the individuals who do click through your ads are not converting. Taking a look at your spend vs. results when it comes to paid media is an important factor in establishing whether a digital strategy refresh is needed. (Numbers to track: paid ad click-through rate, paid ad click-to-conversion rate).
   
   
4. Email campaign does not exist or has stopped producing results. Email marketing is a test of the ability of your organization to engage with your customers: prospects, existing, returning, and even your ex-customers. If your email campaign hasn't been refreshed in a while, and you are not noticing its impact into your monthly sales, then a refresh is called for. Email, when executed correctly, is a form of 'soft power' for your company. It is able to sway and convince individuals over time without being overly pushy and it lets you deliver the proper 'personality' and customization that allows you to get past the simple transactional relationship with your customers at every stage of their life cycle with your product/service. (Numbers to track: number of new subscribers, ratio of open vs. read percentage, click-backs to your website for further engagement).
   
   
5. Your reviews have stopped arriving.
   The common review process applies to B2C organizations, where public reviews are a way to talk to customers using other customer's voices. B2B organizations usually provide case studies to showcase their abiity to solve customer problems or provide specific services successfully. B2C organizations, however, depend on individuals to provide reviews of their own free will. Lack of engagement means that your customers don't feel strong enough to say anything good about their experience with you. Or perhaps you have enforced the 'happiness' measurement, where your staff basically state that unless they get a glowing review they will be demoted, fired, or worse. In any of these cases, lack of customer reviews is a sympton that needs to be addressed by an audit of your digital and/or overall customer experience. (Numbers to track: B2C-number of reviews gathered via multiple channels, number of positive notes willingly provided by customers. B2B-number of case studies on the website, number of pageviews for said case studies on the site).
   
   
6. You have lost sight of the profitability of your digital marketing efforts.
   Many organizations, in their zeal for 'trying everything once', embark on multiple-pronged tactics that take on a life of their own without a proper review of their contribution to the profitability of the overall effort. Having a clear understanding of how your digital marketing spend is profitable as a part of your overall budget is important. This does not mean that you would immediately remove any and all parts of the strategy that are 'unprofitable.' That would be short-term transactional thinking. Instead, your understanding of how the digital marketing budget contributes profitably to your overall finances allows you to nuance your decisions and support your efforts as you see how each element interacts with the customer experience. Not all elements of a strategy will be profitable, but it is important to understand the overall picture, and the contribution that each section provides to the whole. (Number to track: easy to follow formula that states how many digital marketing dollars are needed to make a profitable sale).

An important thing to note is that, as you can probably tell from the descriptions above, each tactic of your digital marketing strategy supports the business and all have internal links to one another. Understanding these links, and learning how to manipulate them to improve results over time (via testing and changing tactics and elements within them for optimization), will lead to overall better results for your digital marketing spend. It will also lead you to make reasonable decisions about the future of your spend, and which channels really help you connect to your customers at every stage of your product/service life cycle.

A thorough, impartial Digital Marketing audit is a good place to begin so decisions can be based on data, balanced by the knowledge and experience of your staff and your customers.