Your CRM or marketing automation tool can’t track the ROI of every campaign. How did your sales come? A combination of things: multi-touch marketing.
But if you didn’t invest in marketing or even worse outsourced it – watch your sales plummet.
We’ve got marketing management all wrong
We’ve got marketing management all wrong.
We’re defining the tactic – email, social media, trade shows, conferences, PR – without clear goals.
As The Cline Group’s Josh Cline wrote, we’re putting the cart before the horse – running forward before we have the goals or a plan.
It’s not a traditional or digital marketing divide. Companies are going to trade shows and looking for MARCOM pros with trade show experience without knowing what trade shows can do for their business and defining what they want to get out of the trade show. They return thousands of dollars in the red and with their pockets stuffed full of business cards and some touristy trinkets. They’re looking for email marketers while buying email addresses, and wonder what their newsletter has done for them, and they are seeking people to create and manage Facebook pages before they even conducting a POST Analysis and defining whether Facebook is the place that their customers are and can achieve your business goals. Then they wonder why they haven’t bought.
This is the way things have been for a long time – except the explosion in digital media and the ability to measure goals immediately and easily with built-in analytics make the status-quo even less acceptable today as businesses can measure their progress with more precision and speed than ever before.
Social media is a perfect example in which many have gotten it wrong. Deciding that their competitive strategy is “social marketing” or hiring for social media without understand what it can (and can not) do for you will not bring results. The age of experimentation is over.
Recently, I’ve seen an explosion in jobs for “social media managers” that don’t define what they expect “social media” to do for the business. Social media is a tool like a telephone – it can be used for all sorts of purposes and there are many different ways and goals it can achieve – advertising, cold calling for leads and sales, customer support, market research, etc. Are they looking for thought leadership and new website visitors from a blog, leads from LinkedIn (and that webinar or white paper), a Facebook community to energize their existing fan-base, a viral boost of brand awareness from the funny video, or a conversation with their target audience? Even worse, they are frequently advertised as entry level when the job requires both strategy and implementation. These are all different goals which can be done by different personalities and have to be implemented differently.
While it’s important to have dedicated staff who knows how to use the tools, it’s even more important to first define your goals.
If you don’t define your goals first, you won’t get results. 63% of B2B companies are still not generating leads from social media – a goal for virtually any company that needs to drive revenue – most likely because social media is siloed and not integrated and because they haven’t built a program to get leads that includes social media.
Social media is mature and has proven results (Facebook itself is 8 years old, the Web is 20 years old, and online forums are even older) that you should be getting a tangible ROI from an approach that includes social media – whether leads, customer support, market research, or whatever other goal that you define. If you don’t have the KPI, don’t pre-determine the tactic. The KPI must be defined in order to generate the ROI. At the same time, approaches and tactics are very different depending on one’s goals. A plan that aims to generate “buzz” – i.e. brand awareness among a mass group of people – is going to look very different than a plan whose goal is leads.
While the potential and capability is there, because companies aren’t defining what they are trying to achieve and the business goals defined by the C-suite aren’t adequately communicated to middle- and lower-managers in the trenches, ROI is not seen.
As Scott Opplinger wrote, “They might not get the results they want because they had no idea what results they were trying to accomplish in the first place and in most cases had no clearly defined method for measuring those results had they defined clear goals.”
Before determining what tactics you want, first map out:
- Your business goals and the timeline you want to achieve it – for example 20% sales growth in 3 months, 33% more leads, 1,000 downloads a month, 10% reduced support costs, increase in conversion from leads to sales, more software renewals, 10 evangelists to write about you a month, etc.
- Develop your benchmark and your goal
- Develop the roadmap of how to achieve these goals – the different mix of tactics that will help achieve them, including KPIs to measure your progress
- Measure your steps periodically and adjust accordingly.
In order to be realized, your business goals require channels and tools such as social media, email marketing, media and analyst relations, SEO, conversion optimization, web design/usability, advertising, and more. But, before hiring an expert in one of those areas, ensure that your marketing management and strategy is developed by someone or a team (like The Cline Group) that understands both the channels and what your entire business aims to achieve.
Megacomm: Analytics for Business Goals
I had the pleasure of speaking this past Thurday at Megacomm, Israel’s main conference for technical and marketing communicators. Paula Stern and the entire team always put on an amazing conference. I was privileged to be able to present.
At Megacomm, I spoke about how data analytics can be used to drive business results and the importance to measure business goals and the paths to meet these goals and go beyond the “What?” of traditional clickstream data to ask “Why?”
By asking different questions and using the right analysis we can improve our conversions and meet our goals.
My presentation is below:
Feel free to see it in fullscreen on Slideshare.
After my presentation, several people came up to me asking some great questions of what to do with the data of people who read their documentation. One good question I was asked was how to use more data to see where, as technical writers, they should focus their documentation to lead to greatest user satisfaction (and, of course, sales). I suggested a survey and asking them the 3 most important questions to ask your website visitors. What do you think?
These are great questions and I’m glad to see people in all fields using data to help them do their job.
Did you attend the conference? What did you think? Let me know if you have any questions or issues I should discuss next time.
Selected Tools:
Resources:
Using Web Analytics to Measure Your PR Results
One of the things I’ve always advocated when consulting clients or internally is to measure business outcomes, not just activities.
Digital marketing has actually made tracking actual business results much easier and much more accountable than print or telephone channels.
In digital marketing, this requires web analytics. There are several types of analytics, but the most popular is click-stream, which tracks actual clicks and visits.
Many of us have Google Analytics or other click-stream tracking set up … but many of us probably have never checked it.
This is a huge mistake. By measuring our web data, we can:
- determine the effects of our outcomes. In PR, this may be determining which media outlets or wire services drive more traffic or more conversions (you did define your conversion metrics, right?)
- Determine effective channels
- Determine which messaging drives more conversions
- Determining if there are missed messages or missed areas that are gaining traction despite not being targeted – discover untargeted and hidden markets
- Determine which channels, both paid and earned media, drive more conversions
- Evaluate decision making funnels, across multi-channel campaigns
Traditional public relations measured outputs, not outcomes. Traditional PR reports measure data such as coverage volume, placements, sentiment, etc. But what business value does that provide?
Of course, before implementing a tool, we need to define our conversions: our overall business goal and the steps along the sales and decision funnel that are necessary in order to achieve this goal. As our campaign is running, we should be analyzing our results to see where we need to optimize. This may mean pitching new reporters, using a different wire service, or perhaps refining our message.
By incorporating an effective analytics programs into our marketing campaigns, we don’t have to guess the business results: rather we can see them as they happen. Without them, we’re operating blind.
Is Your Store Making Sales? How about Your Website?
If you owned a store and no one came to the store, you would worry. You wouldn’t say, “Well, I did my job. I opened up my store. There’s even merchandise here and a semi-functioning cash register. Someone who really wants to buy can.”
If that was the case, you would wonder what was wrong. Perhaps you would invest in a promotional campaign: maybe take out an advertisement, contact local media to try to get a story, give a sales discount to customers who check in via FourSquare, offer a Groupon or Living Social coupon, or pass out fliers in the parking lot.
But, for many people, this is the case with the web. They build a website and expect customers to come knocking at their door. The web is not Field of Dreams. It’s just not true that if you build it, they will come.
Websites need to be seen by your target audience, who are taking your pre-defined actions (you did define them, right? If not, a strategic marketing consultant can help you map your business aims to your implementation). Maybe you need SEO, or advertising, or promoting your website to the media, or on your sales collateral? There are a lot of options, which work together in a holistic fashion.
OK, so now you’ve got traffic? But is it achieving your business goals?
Let’s go back to the store. The small store now is packed with visitors. Barely any space left, especially during some peak periods. There’s no room to move with all the visitors.
But they aren’t buying.
You wouldn’t say “But we’re getting a lot of visitors, so everything is OK.”
Sadly, the more sophisticated firms tend to say that about their website. They are doing the first steps of measuring site traffic and maybe even traffic courses, but that’s not enough to see if they are converting.
Your website serves to serve a business goal. That could be as simple as making sure potential customers know your hours and location to it could be downloading trial software, registering for your online class, making a purchase or donation.
Is it doing its goal? If not, why not?
Could it be poor design? Lack of credibility? Not clear what your positioning is? Why use your product? The conversion not clearly defined? No clear calls to action? There are a lot of problems but first you need to identify the process before you can identify the path to solve it.
Your website is there to serve business goals.
Make sure they are serving their goals. If not, test and optimizing.
Some keys to site optimization:
- Set business goals and translate them into technical goals
- Track these goals in your analytics solution. No need for an expensive system – Google Analytics will do for most needs, for click-stream data.
- Identify the results of your marketing channels: which channels are converting more and why
- Guess what’s converting and why and create new tests
- Test, Test, and Test.
- Adjust.
- Test some more
- Improve Results and Continue
In order to make revenue for ecommerce (and, ecommerce is anything in which your business requires conversions to take place online), the following is your funnel:
This requires both business and technical knowledge. It’s ideal if your business strategist understands technology and web analytics, as well, in order to ensure that the goals are properly defined, and are integrated. But, even if you need a separate strategist and implementer, it’s important that its integrated.
Business Goal: To convert visitors. Conversions can be:
- Sale
- Increasing one sale to two sales
- Attending for a seminar or class (for an educational institution, for example)
- Making a donation
Objective:
- Lowering online costs instead of via a call center or mail
- Generating leads
- Educating the public
Possible Tactics to Use and Integrate, after defining a clear marketing strategy and market positioning:
- SEO
- Link Building: Public Relations or Wire Service Distribution
- Referral Traffic: Media Articles
- Technical On-page Optimization
- MARCOM: Content
- Positioning: Keyword Research
- Conversion Optimization
- A/B or Multivariate Testing
- Testing Different Calls to Action
- Testing Form Design and Fields (are you asking too many questions or questions that your analytics tools will answer?)
Avi Hein is one of only about 36 individuals in Israel who are Google Analytics Certified, signifying certification and knowledge in website conversion and measurements.