A digital marketer needs a mix of skills to be successful. But the difference between successful marketing campaigns and missteps often comes down to how you leverage digital marketing tools to collect, organize and analyze campaign data.
Whether you’re a digital marketing pro or new to the field, there are some best practices that you should keep in mind. The exact methods and digital marketing tools will vary, but you’ll see better results if you keep these things in mind.
1. Always Align Your KPIs and Leading Indicators to Your Campaigns.
It’s easy to say a campaign is about traffic acquisition, lead generation or sales; but you need to be able to define progress and success in terms of metrics. Make sure you clearly state the key performance indicators like revenue, orders or leads before you start.
You also want to think about leading indicators. Leading indicators are the metrics that support you reaching your goals and signal progress. For example, if your ecommerce conversion rate is five percent and your goal is five orders, then you’ll need one hundred visits to reach your goal. In this example, the number of visits is the leading indicator. You should regularly monitor leading indicators to make sure your campaign is on track.
2. Understand the Lifecycle of Your Campaigns
If you send an email at 6pm on Friday, when will you see the traffic? This kind of question can be tricky and often leads to poor alignment between activities and reporting. Some campaigns are designed to show results in a very narrow timeframe while others may have a lag or be expected to payoff over an extended time period. For example, if you’re doing a twenty-four hour sale, then you want all the traffic from your email, search marketing and other channels to arrive during that twenty-four hour period.
Staying mindful of the difference between when a campaign goes to market and when its effects will be visible will allow you to properly plan seasonal or other time-sensitive campaigns.
3. Be Alert to Sudden Shifts in Behavior
One of the worst experiences for any marketer is getting to work in the morning and realizing that you’ve had an overnight site outage or a sudden drop in traffic due to a Google penalty. Problems like these can’t always be avoided, but you want to know about them as soon as possible. Most digital marketing tools are designed to report on what’s happening from a traffic perspective, but you should also look into site monitoring tools to make sure you know if there is a server problem or a sudden increase in page load times.
If you don’t want to invest in a separate site monitoring tool, then look at setting up real-time alerts in your analytics tool to notify you when traffic shifts away from historical norms.
4. Balance Real-time Behavior & Future Planning
Planning becomes more and more important as marketing campaigns get larger and more complex. Consequently, you can end up spending a lot of time thinking about next quarter and next year, and ignoring what’s happening right now.
A good reporting system can keep you from missing big events, but you should also look for ways to inject real-time behavior into your planning. Consider maintaining a real-time analytics dashboard to monitor what’s happening throughout the day. No, you won’t have the time to constantly stare at it, but you should plan to check it for a few minutes during peak traffic hours or right after a major campaign goes live.
One of the big advantages to real-time monitoring is the ability to make quick corrections and optimizations on-the-fly. For example, if you spot a sudden surge in traffic on a keyword, then you can make adjustments to your PPC bidding or on-page SEO to maximize the benefit. You might spot this opportunity in a report the next day, but you’d get the most benefit if you caught it early. Real-time monitoring can help you grab these types of wins.
5. Data Integration is a Form of Marketing Optimization
Marketing relies on a growing number of tools. You need a comprehensive view of the data from these tools, their metrics, and their relationships in order to see the big picture.
A smart way to improve marketing is taking the time to get your different tools talking to each other. Common examples are making sure that your email campaigns and webinar attendees are tracking correctly in your CRM. It might seem simple, but getting this task done would lead to better understanding of your sales process and the impact of different.
Whether you’re an SMB or a larger enterprise, there is alway more to learn. Hopefully, these best practices will help you get more from current marketing efforts and future campaigns.
