Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
Importance of measuring results
Monitoring and measuring the results of your digital strategies can provide you with insights on:
- What is working
- What isn’t working
- Where you can improve
- Whether you successfully engage your target audience
- Whether you have improved from one time period to the next
- Which areas of your strategy you need to focus attention on
The first step is mapping your marketing plan. What exactly is it that you are going to do? Once you have that map, you can add metrics to it, to help show how you’re doing on your journey. Then you can create composite metrics and determine the business impact of your plan. This data allows you to review and repeat what it is that you are doing. Do you need to refine your map? Do you need to add other metrics to the map? Are there some metrics that are not helpful that you could remove?
Which KPIs to use
KPIs that can be used to measure the success of digital strategies can include (but are not limited to):
- Growth of your digital and social communities
- Engagement with and around your brand
- Positive sentiment amplified
- Increase in qualified leads from social
- Percentage market share
- New customer acquisition rates
- Effectiveness of paid media campaigns across channels and communities
- Reach and impressions
- Average revenue per channel
- SLAs for: response rate / speed / accuracy (for social care)
- Marketing cost per advocate
- Average order per customer or subscriber
- Net Promote Score (NPS)
- Website visits
- Positive or negative product or service reviews
Vanity versus quality metrics
- Vanity metrics only touch on the surface of some quantitative elements, such as number of fans, social media ‘likes’, followers, subscribers, conversations, and so on. They don’t really provide you with any actionable outputs. So they don’t give you information on whether you are achieving what you wanted to achieve, or how you could change that situation.
- Quality metrics highlight the potential business impact a little bit more, such as conversion rate, customer acquisition percentage, increase in qualified leads from digital channels, response SLA, and so on. These metrics are more appropriate to your business and channels, and actually do provide actionable outputs, allowing you make more informed decisions.
Adjusting strategy according to insights
Know how to improve the effectiveness of your digital initiatives by gathering meaningful insights and adjusting your strategy in real time.
To achieve this, you will need to not only look at industry benchmarks, but at your own company data, such as increases or decreases in:
- Sentiment
- Customers retained
- Customers acquired
- Customer engagement with your brand and with your content (comments, shares, and so on)
- Click-throughs
- Visit abandonment or unsubscribes
- Average order
- In-store traffic and/or coupon redemption driven by social or digital
- Customer service requests
- Time to case resolution
- Potential crises averted
- Legal licensing fees
- Spend and team/execution efficiencies
Kristin Shine
Kristin Shine is Founder and General Manager of Shine Healthcare and Science Consulting. She advises clients in the healthcare space on digital strategy development, business development, strategic communications, and commercial partnerships.
