The BlueBolt marketing team attended a fantastically informative Chicago American Marketing Association (AMA) event last Thursday on Navy Pier in the WBEZ offices. Jon Morris of Rise Interactive spoke about Building a Digital Marketing Plan.
Instinct? Schminstinct. Don’t follow your gut, follow the numbers. Jon focused on the importance of allowing data (including web analytics) to be the guide that pushes your marketing towards success.
Ask yourself 5 important questions:
1. What are your goals?
2. What is your budget?
3. How are you performing against your goals and why?
4. What is driving performance?
5. What are you doing about it?
Define your Goals.
This is not simple. Goals need to be incredibly precise with numbers attached to them.
There are three general buckets that companies will fall into: Lead generation, ecommerce and branding. Goals for each type of client will be drastically different.
- For lead generation consider the conversion rate and cost per lead when defining goals.
- Ecommerce is all about sales.
- In branding be sure to measure effectiveness by assigning numerical value to each touch point (video hits, facebook likes, retweets, etc.). This number is kind of arbitrary, but it’s the best we can do.
Propose a Budget.
A budget will give your business direction and guidance. Define a budget and focus on achieving it.
Consider the different channels you are budgeting for. Some channels don’t make sense to spend money on if your budget is too low. Some channels require a certain amount of monetary investment to determine and achieve success.
Evaluate.
Dive in, find out exactly what factors are pushing your success forward and which factors are holding you back. Then consider how your competition is doing (but don’t base your strategy off of their success and failures as their goals are not identical to your goals).
Remember: Everything in the world of internet marketing is measurable.
What makes you so great, anyways?
None of these questions can be answered accurately if you can’t quantify what makes you great. To quantify your greatness consider the rate at which your company is growing in comparison to your industry. Then consider your retention rate. If your company is growing rapidly but your retention rate is low, something is wrong.
Now that you know how great you are and why, let other people know using your marketing strategy.
Success is a funnel and it flows like this:
Awareness
Consideration
Conversion
Loyalty
Advocacy
Build brand awareness > Allow consumers to consider your business as an option > Convert them into customers > Make your customers love you and your product > Your customers will then suggest you to others.
A big thanks to Jon Morris for all of this great information!