Linking Results to Business Objectives

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Importance of performance data analysis

As a digital strategist, you’re likely to collect a lot of performance data. It’s important that you understand how to analyze your data effectively. This can help you identify patterns and trends, generate valuable campaign insights, and make smarter decisions. Ultimately, this should help to drive business growth and make the organization as a whole more profitable and successful.

Frequency of monitoring

But how often should you monitor the performance of your digital strategy? The answer is: frequently.

You should monitor performance on a regular basis. Most strategists tend to review performance quarterly, bi-annually, and annually. This should provide a steady stream of performance data that you can use to gauge the success of your campaigns. It can also guide your organization’s long-term decision-making. 

Key performance areas to monitor

When monitoring performance, pay attention to those areas that provide the most useful data. Key performance areas to focus on include:

• SEO visibility
• PPC conversion rate
• Social media engagement rate
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC) across all channels
• Email subscribers, open rate, and conversion rate

The insights that you glean from analyzing these critical performance areas can have a major influence on the company’s future strategic direction and decisions – and on the success of your marketing campaigns.

Aligning KPIs with wider business objectives

Be sure to align the KPIs of your digital strategy with the organization’s overall business objectives. Make sure the KPIs you choose are quantifiable and measurable and provide you with meaningful data that can help the organization achieve its goals.

Some of the most useful digital strategy KPIs include:

• Revenue
• Conversion
• New customers
• Customer lifetime value (CLV)
• Profitability over time

Objectives, strategies, and KPIs

When your business objectives, the digital strategies you follow to achieve these objectives, and the KPIs you use to measure your success are aligned and interlinked, you increase your chance of success while simultaneously driving growth throughout the organization.

Objectives

Strategies

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Conversion objective

Increase the average order value of online sales to $50 per customer

Use ecommerce platform to

Show users best-related products in each product category

Show users bundle deals for products they are viewing

Percentage of site visitors responding to the cross-selling and bundles messaging

This chart shows an example of the relationship between all these elements. It contains a clear business objective, and an accompanying digital strategy that clearly sets out how you can accomplish it. And because the objective is quantifiable, you have associated KPIs that you can use to measure your effectiveness.

Let’s see how this works. The business objective is a typical conversion objective that aims to increase the average order value of online sales to $50 per customer. You can see that the strategies you can use to achieve this objective is showing users the best-related products and introducing bundle deals. These are real, actionable steps that you can take to achieve your goal.

After that, you can evaluate your success by using the KPIs listed , measuring the percentage of site visitors responding to the cross-selling and bundles messaging. Again, these KPIs aren’t vague or ambiguous. Instead, they’re clearly stated and highly measurable. And because your strategy provided a clear roadmap to follow, you’re more likely to achieve a successful outcome.

Reporting on strategy performance

After you analyze and measure your digital strategy performance, you’ll likely be called upon to report your results and findings to the senior management team and to colleagues in other departments. For the digital marketing strategist, knowing which data points to communicate to senior leaders and nonmarketers – and when – is an important skill. Remember, there are many metrics in digital marketing that are meaningful to practitioners, but which lose resonance when communicated outside of their original context.

You must present the information in a way that nonmarketers will understand. So, if you detect a significant pattern in the search volume for a product category, for example, put this into terms that your audience will immediately grasp. You could describe it as ‘increased market demand’ when speaking to colleagues in the finance department, for instance. Always consider the audience’s level of expertise when communicating specific, sometimes technical, data points.

When reporting results to senior management, be sure to include your expected ROI and key metrics that demonstrate your overall digital performance. These areas are likely to be of most interest and concern to them.