Has your management ever asked for a report on the effectiveness overall or specific digital marketing campaigns?
Do you know what the conversion rate impact of your blog posts has been over the last three years?
Can you measure the effectiveness of your content marketing posts on social media and how engaged your followers are?
Are there specific metrics to measure the return on investments in Search Engine AdWords, Banner Advertising, and Social ads?
Digital Channels and Tools
Marketers have created a range of strategies and tactics to leverage digital marketing channels. These include a combination of SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (Bing & Google AdWords, and Social Media ads). Each of these channels digital channels require content optimized to their audience in a range of formats.
The flow of traffic to your content and from your digital channels can be measured using tools like Google Analytics. Also, conversions can be viewed using Analytics and Tag Manager. Previously it’s been hard to determine the full return on prospects targets following your trail of digital crumbs back to your site landing pages. The development of Marketing Automation tools like Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, and others have by-and-large solved that issue. These platforms allow users to track those visits to your website and build intelligence about each visitor as they return to your site or engage with your various social channels.
The Value of Tracking
Capturing the frequency of a prospects visits to landing pages, Understanding the type of content they’re reading (or downloading), and which digital path (aka channel) they come from enables you to populate prospect, and client personas with behavioral and preference data. This allows marketers to understand a prospect’s interest and if that person is showing indications that they are ready to be engaged by your sales teams.
Using Marketing Automation tools, marketers can “score” each visitor, based on whatever factors you consider to be significant, and then pass on that profile information sales team for follow-up. This gives marketers the ability to determine exactly how effective each digital marketing campaign performs based on your various channels and allows you segment those that are casual browsers, actively researching, in evaluations, or are very close to purchasing.
Nurturing Prospects to ROI
Nurturing leads through the process to increase conversion to opportunity can also be managed using Automation platforms. Using a series of planned out content offers. Marketers can introduce offerings that are highly relevant to visitors based on where they’re at in lead-to-sales funnel.
If a prospect shows various levels of interest in your content, for example by not opening emails, or opening but not clicking-thru, or clicking-thru, but not responding to the call-to-action they can progress up or down the automation scoring system. This allows you to evaluate how best to pursue those lead.
This is an ongoing process of learning, evaluation, and fine tuning of the automation tools and prospect databases. It’s not a one-and-done process. There in lays the misconception that many people have about marketing automation systems.
Tom Griggs
Tom’s experience in marketing and business development in the B2B Software space started in Analytics, and grew into broader data integration, management, governance, and consulting services for software vendors and their partner channel community. Tom has built and led marketing and inside sales teams at several leading enterprise software and consulting firms. His experience includes brand management, channel marketing, building modern marketing automation systems, developing innovative demand generation programs, building and leading business development teams. Find Tom on – 