Internet marketing has opened up an entirely new realm of opportunities to engage with customers and create new conversations. The best part is that these opportunities are available to everyone, whether it’s a B2B or B2C company, a nonprofit, or any variation in between.
The days where you had limited channels to interact with a potential client base are gone, replaced instead with numerous chances to post interesting and unique content. By including free content online, you’re showcasing your company’s talent while at the same time providing a valuable resource to current and potential customers.
Despite the benefits of these opportunities, some companies are struggling to evaluate their ROI because their previous offline measurements aren’t translating to the world of internet marketing. To avoid this pitfall, you need to update your metrics and find new ways to measure progress. Here are questions you can use to measure the effectiveness of your online marketing:
How far is your reach?
Perhaps one of the most important ways to determine what kind of impact your marketing has online is to monitor social media interaction coupled with the amount of sign-ups you have for email newsletters or webinars. With the variety of ways you can market your company comes equally as many ways to monitor your reach. Below are some important numbers to consider (and how to find them) when trying to measure the impression you’re making online:
a. Facebook includes a report of people liking and interacting with your page through the Insights tab that includes everything from page likes to engagement. One of the most important numbers to gather from here is your impressions, which will tell you how many people are not only interacting with your page by liking or commenting posts, but also those who may be passively interacting or reading what you post.
b. Similarly to Facebook, Twitter also has analytics easily available that will show you the progress your account has been making on a monthly basis—including your top follower for each month and what tweets were most successful. Twitter analytics also allows you to look into the demographics and psychographics of your audience to give you even further information on your clientele. You can access Twitter analytics by going to analytics.twitter.com.
c. At this point the necessity of Google Analytics in relation to SEO marketing has been well documented, but using this tool can also provide further insight beyond keywords that are bringing you traffic organically. Like Twitter, Google Analytics includes demographic, location, device and psychographic information to better understand those who are using your website. The information that Google Analytics collects is impressive in sheer size so don’t let the amount of data available overwhelm your search for finding out who your content is reaching.
Are people downloading your content?
It’s one thing to post information online and another to have people actually interacting with the content you’re producing. Hopefully what you’re choosing to upload is varied, including options like eBooks, whitepapers, webinars, or even podcasts.
While it’s great to have these resources online and available to your customer, you also need to measure how many people are actually downloading or viewing your content. Ideally, finding out the number of people using your information should be easily tracked through analytics and incorporated into your impressions measurement.
You also want to pay attention to your conversion rates for downloads. You can look at this by the number of pageviews a certain landing page had, divided by the number of people that downloaded the content (known as a conversion), and then you have your conversion rate. You need this metric to justify success from campaign to campaign so you can continuously improve upon it.
Are other bloggers talking about you?
Gone are the days where news outlets are the go-to resource for determining your public perception. Now bloggers are the voice of reason and truth behind many decisions to buy a product or associate with a brand.
When customers are trying to make choices about your product or service, they’re seeking an authentic voice that will tell them the truth about how valuable your company is. With bloggers functioning as the voice of the people, it’s important to find out if you’re even part of the conversation.
Actively monitoring any mentions you receive on blogs will give you a better understanding of the type of impression you’re making online. You can easily do this by setting up Google alerts for your name or brand to see whenever you get mentioned online.
Tip: To have these alerts sent to your work e-mail, just setup a filter so that any alerts sent to your Gmail are automatically forwarded to your work e-mail. If you need help setting this up check out this video:
What kind of reviews are you getting?
Aside from finding out if you’re being talked about, you also need to find out what people are saying about you. Knowing that you’re a hot topic of conversation is one thing, but it will provide you no benefit if your feedback is negative. In the case of internet marketing, all publicity is not good. If you come across a negative review on a site like Yelp, Facebook, or Google, you need to address the issue.
While your gut instinct might be to leave a comment, you’re opening yourself and your company up to internet trolls that will only inflame the situation more. First, privately reach out to the reviewer if you know who they are and ask to address the situation. Maybe there is something you can offer them, or can somehow resolve whatever it was that sparked the bad review in hopes that they will have the good graces to either delete or edit their review.
Reviews not only hurt your reputation when people are researching your brand online, but it can also hurt your rankings in the search engines. Besides dozens of other ranking factors, if you don't have any good reviews but your local competitors do, then they will most likely rank higher than you if there is a local search pack like this one for dentists in Lancaster, PA.
To get the stars to show in Google, you need to have at least 5 reviews. It definitely makes your result stand out more, so it is important to get good reviews if you want to outrank your competitors.
Are you utilizing sEO Marketing?
SEO marketing encompasses a lot of different strategies including on-page optimization, link building, content marketing, improving website user experience, conversion rate optimization, call tracking and so much more.
If you are doing PPC marketing, are you able to track the calls you are getting from that ad spend? If you don't have call tracking, how can you determine that your money is being well spent and from what mediums when you get a phone call?
You should have content on your website that is resourceful and helpful in your industry. A very important factor in SEO marketing is getting relevant and authoritative links to your website. To do that, you need to have "linkable assets" on your site. This means that you need to offer content on your website that when someone in your industry, whether a blogger, journalist, editor, or industry expert or influencer, it needs to be worthwhile enough for them to take the time to write about that topic and link to your piece of content.
If you only talk about your products and services on your website, than no one will want to link to you. That would be promotional and advertorial, and it doesn't help the audience of the website linking to you.
How many people are contacting you?
Hopefully your website is enabled with a feature or page that allows customers to contact you with further inquiries. While having this function available is important, it will mean nothing if your customers, both current and potential, are taking the opportunity to interact via this channel with questions and request for information.
When people are contacting you, like we mentioned before, you need to be able to track from what campaigns they are calling from. Whether it be postcards with a specific landing page for that campaign, a different call tracking number for your AdWords and website, or having a different phone number in your e-mail marketing campaigns. Whatever you choose, you need to be able to decipher which marketing campaigns are producing what leads and calls so you can more accurately track what campaigns are working the best.
Are you meeting your sales goals?
While all these measurements are essential to effective internet marketing, all of these boil down to whether or not the management teams are seeing revenue and profit. The internet hasn’t changed the ultimate goal of achieving profit and your ROI research should reflect these numbers accordingly.
Every business should have revenue goals for their business. If you know how much a cost per lead is then you can look at how many leads you are getting, the average conversion rate it takes to get that lead for each campaign, and how much revenue it produces. If you have the analytics and metrics in place to track these, then over time you can use this data to determine that if you spend X on marketing, that you should gain X amount in revenue from it.
If you find that your business is spending money on marketing but you really aren't sure what's successful or how to track these leads and sales, then let us know. We can give you some pointers or setup everything for you so you can concentrate on your business. Our digital marketing agency has been helping Lancaster businesses with SEO services, internet marketing services, email marketing, and more.
