In the old days of marketing, the craft of reaching out to customers was largely intuitive. Marketers and salespeople had to design the best creative campaigns that they could, and then just see how well they worked. From there, you have the drama of AMC’s hit classic TV show “Mad Men” and everything else that goes along with this kind of blind marketing.
It’s a lot different today — with so many new technologies and digital advances, marketers now have the ability to work from known metrics and outcomes, to design more effective marketing campaigns and sales funnels. Digital marketing performance is accurately measurable and that makes it even more exciting.
Many of these performance metrics are called Key Performance Indicators or KPIs. How do local businesses use these to achieve success in their communities?
Business leaders will look at things like sales and direct revenues, but they’ll also get a glance at specific types of lead generation, and find out more about how web campaigns work, using specific bits of data gleaned through digital systems.
For example, a company can use a web form to get submission details from a prospective customer. That allows them to see more about that customer, before a deal is ever made. It enhances the sales funnel, and makes the salesforce more informed and gives them a better edge toward conversion.
Looking At Online Engagement and Participation
The engagement side has a lot to do with what companies offer online. Marketers can log in and assess metrics like the click through rate (CTR), which is how many people clicked into the site, and the bounce rate, which represents how many people quickly dropped out of the site, instead of doing deeper reading.
These items are important for Google rankings, but they’re also valuable business intelligence — without them, how do you know if people are really interested in what’s on your website?
Even e-mail marketing has its own metrics. Using things like phase marketing and A/B testing, e-mail campaign managers can see how these messages are reaching customers. They can tweak things like the rate of message delivery, time of day, and even the phrasing or structure of e-mails to make them more effective.
Platforms like Google Analytics can be effective here. Google Analytics can help to provide detail on practical metrics including page views and session lengths for users. By digging into this data, companies can get a much better idea of how well they’re reaching their audiences.
Technical Marketing: A Life-Saver in the Digital Age
Too many companies don’t invest in these types of “scientific” marketing, but in the end, they need to do so to grow their customer base and better understand their current customers. They may have a website, but no clear call to action, so that people just read, and can never take any kind of step forward. They might have valuable industry information and great landing pages online, but no lead generation forms, so that they never collect the business information about the site visitors that they can use to follow through.
When you pay attention to such KPIs and add these things to a website, you get exponentially marketing improvements — without a whole lot of cost. WebSubstance can help companies to take their online game up a few notches, by engaging in precise, metrics-based marketing, instead of just trusting in the power of creativity. Talk to us about how to add both science and art to a web footprint, to get the best of both worlds, and really drive customer interest.
