The Experts: Measuring Success with Digital Marketing

success with digital marketingA great Inbound and Content Marketing  strategy is only as good as its results. There is no shortage of tools to help output metrics on your digital marketing champagnes including Google Analytics and  individual social media analytics. However, it can be difficult to determine what success with digital marketing actually looks like. What metrics should you observe? What tools help you measure results accurately? How do you analyze the numbers you see? The experts once again weigh in on how to measure success with Digital Marketing.

Here’s what they had to say:

That’s a loaded question because “success” can be defined in different ways. For some brands, success is awareness or more users. For some brands, success is leads and sales. I would say that articulating goals and establishing benchmarks are necessary so success can be quantified in some way.

– Mark Evans, Principal at Mark Evans Consulting, @markevans

In the end, it’s all about creating pipeline and revenue. Marketers should move away from vanity metrics such as traffic and shares, and focus on KPIs that tell the story of their buyer personas across the revenue funnel.

I love referring to HubSpot’s Lifecycle stages: Subscriber, Marketing Qualified Lead, Sales Qualified Lead, Opportunity, Customer, and Evangelist. These are simply the steps that buyers take before and after making a purchase. Taking a look at the number of users at each stage and how they convert (conversion rates) is a good starting point.

– José Sánchez, Director of Marketing at Sales for Life, @zesanchezr

Like any other effort, you set goals and try to blow those goals out of the water. ‘Defining success’ does not change that one bit. Whether it’s sales, impressions, or whatever your benchmark is, that’s your measure – it does not change because you lean towards digital. If you start to overthink this, then you are believing your own hype and you should stop immediately, you little disrupter you.

– Jon Sinden, Vice President Marketing at Beerlicious, @JonSinden

Success is just about the most relative word in the English language, so what success means for your own digital marketing efforts needs to start with your own goals. If your goals are increasing engagement or driving awareness, success will look like increases in return visits, page views, time per visit, and social shares. If your goals are more focused around growth and lead generation, success will look like increases in leads, click-through rates, and more MQLs that become SQLs. And of course no conversation about measuring success would be complete without a discussion of the tools you can use to help you get a handle of what’s working and why. And there are many. But when it comes to tools, it’s important to pay particular attention to the ones that provide not just metrics and statistics, but true insights; insights like why a particular white paper clicked with a specific buyer persona, which types of content consistently lead to the most leads or engagement, or how to improve your content’s performance with search engines. You can find these types of insight in tools like Moz, Kapost, and yes, Uberflip.

– Sam Brennand, Director of Customer Success at Uberflip, @SamBrennand

Despite all the changes in the availability of marketing software, I think clicks (or taps on a tablet/mobile device), conversions, engagement (i.e. time spent on a website or number of Likes and comments on a social media post), downloads, leads and sales are still the 6 key performance indicators all digital marketers should be monitoring and measuring their success with.

– Sourov De, Managing Partner at Stryve Digital Marketing, @Sourovde

I always like to start by clarifying the business problem you are trying to solve.  Once you’ve clearly stated the problem, you should be able to define a key metric or two that will help you determine if you are impacting that problem for your organization with your digital marketing efforts.  For example, if your problem is that you are struggling to close business with the leads you have, one success metric may be closing rate on inbound leads.  Next, examine your digital activities to determine what might be impacting this lower closing rate.  Implement countermeasures such as updated content on your website, development of blog posts that speak to your ideal client more directly, updated key words etc.  Continue to measure your key metric over time and watch closely how your countermeasures are affecting this metric.

– Shelley Mayer, President at Ramp Communications, @shelleymayer

Look at your conversions and how they are driving your sales and revenue. Ultimately, it all comes down to revenue. Lots of marketers focus on things such as website visitors or blog post comments. However, are those comments helping you achieve your sales and marketing goals? Or are the comments just something else you need to manage every day? Are your website visitors staying on your site, opting in for your content and becoming leads?

– Rachel Foster, CEO and B2B Copywriter at Fresh Perspective Copywriting, @CopywriterTO

One of the great things about digital marketing is that you get some great quantifiable numbers.  The key for a growing firm is to target a few specific targets for the team.  Things like page views, sessions, inbound leads, and closed inbound leads I find are the most important. The team can then drill down into the other analytics to help drive improved overall targets.  It is then easy to try and tweak small things and see the quantifiable benefits. We tweaked a few things around our white paper and social campaigns. This lead to an over 50% increase in inbound leads with only 10% increase in traffic

– Mark Elliott, Co-Founder at Venture Accelerator Partners, @markeelliott

How you you measure your digital marketing efforts? Are there any specific metrics or tools you use to keep yourself on track? Let us know in the comments below.

If you’d like to catch up on our other posts in The Experts series, check out: Digital Marketing Trends for 2016 and Biggest Challenge for Digital Marketers.

The Experts: Measuring Success with Digital Marketing